Jobless rate in Britain tumbles to a near 50-year low

The unemployment rate in Britain has reached a nearly 50-year low of 3.5 percent as companies continued to hire staff due to the cost of living crisis.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), only 1.16 million people were unemployed and looking for a job in June to August, the lowest since early 1974.

And for the first time ever, there were more job openings than people to fill them, with 1.2 million positions advertised.

The labor market data came as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Britain would grow faster than any other major advanced economy this year – just weeks after criticism of Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts.

Production is set to grow by 3.6 percent this year, which contradicts Labor’s accusation that the UK is the worst-performing economy in the G7.

But rising interest rates and inflation will push the prospects for future growth to just 0.3 percent by 2023.

This would only be ahead of Germany and Italy in the G7.

Kwarteng said the jobs figures show that ‘the fundamentals of the UK economy remain resilient’.

The unemployment rate in the eurozone is almost twice as high, at 6.6 percent. But there were also some uncomfortable numbers from the ONS.

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have given up their jobs since the pandemic hit.

There are 9 million ‘inactive’ people of working age in the UK – 21.7 per cent of the working population – who are out of work and not looking for one.

The increase of about 500,000 since the start of the pandemic is mainly due to the number of long-term sick people reaching an all-time high.

It means that the actual employment rate, at 75.5 percent, is lower than 76.5 percent before the pandemic.

And as wages rise, ‘real’ wages, which take into account the rising cost of living, have continued to fall by 2.4 percent.