UK labour market "has dodged a bullet"

The latest unemployment figures indicate that employment conditions in the UK are starting to improve.

This is according to research fellow at the Institute for employment studies Thomas Usher, who explained that figures from the Office for National indicating that the increase in unemployment during the quarter to October 2009 was the smallest since spring 2008 suggest the country’s labour market has ’dodged a bullet’.

Job vacancies were up and redundancies fell, but Mr Usher warned that it would be unrealistic to expect these trends to ’gather pace’ in the months to come.

He remarked that the reason losses have not climbed to as high as some people had predicted was that employers have been cutting hours and implementing pay freezes rather than laying people off.

As a result, they will be less likely to hire new staff in the future, he concluded.

Yesterday, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress Brendan Barber welcomed the figures, but warned against complacency in solving the unemployment problem.ADNFCR-2318-ID-19519324-ADNFCR