End of furlough ‘has not led to surge in jobseekers’
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The end of the multi-billion-pound furlough wage subsidy has not led to a surge in new job-seekers, according to data that suggests unemployment is unlikely to rise sharply and may bolster the case for a Bank of England interest rate hike.
Data by recruitment website Indeed, seen by Reuters ahead of publication, shows only a slight rise in the proportion of Brits who say they are urgently looking for a new job.
So far there have been no official figures on what has happened to workers who were still on furlough when the scheme ended at the end of September.
The ONS estimates between 900,000 and 1.4m employees were furloughed in late September, up to 700,000 of them full-time, and much has been made of where these dormant staffers will go when the money runs out.
That uncertainty is one reason why some BoE policymakers think it would be better to wait than to raise interest rates this week.
Last week, government budget forecasters predicted unemployment would rise to 1.8m people or 5.25 per cent of the workforce in the final quarter of this year, up from 4.5 per cent in the three months to August.
But Indeed’s survey of 5,000 working-age British people, conducted in mid-October, showed no big jump in job-seekers.
The proportion of people who said they were “actively looking, urgently” for a job rose to 7.7 per cent of the workforce in October from seven per cent in September and 6.8 per cent in July, when Indeed started the survey. The share of people “actively looking, not urgently” for a new job rose to 17.9 per cent from 17.3 per cent.
Indeed said the increase in active job-seekers between October and September was not statistically significant.