The UK labour market remains resilient

The UK labour market continues to perform strongly, in spite of the poor economic environment, with employment rising and unemployment low.

ONS research shows that the employment rate rose slightly in the period from December 2022 to February 2023, reaching 75.8%, although this remains just below the pre-COVID level.

Unemployment rose slightly to 3.8% in January 2023, but redundancies have been falling for the past three months.

The number of vacancies continues to fall. This could indicate that employers are again finding it easier to recruit, which would be positive, suggesting that hiring concerns are not constraining economic output.

The hospitality sector has found recruiting very tough since the pandemic and this continues in recent results, there has only been a slight improvement over the past few months.

The number of inactive adults has been falling slowly, but steadily, since July 2022. Compared to the last 3 month period, about 66,000 people have ceased left economic inactivity, mainly 16-24 year-olds moving into the labour market.