The London Datastore’s latest update

For London, in the three months to June 2020 compared against the previous quarter:

• The employment rate fell 0.4 percentage points (pp) to 76.5%.

• The unemployment rate was 4.6% – unchanged from last quarter.

• The economic inactivity rate increased to 19.7% (0.4pp).

• The number of claims in London has gone up by 154% since March (around 284.6k) – higher than the UK increase for the same period (117%).

• Between June and July the number of claims went up by around 16.9k, after decreasing between May and June (-3.6k).

• Workers aged 25-29 saw the largest year on year increase in claims (+246%).

• All age groups in the capital saw the number of claims increasing by more than their UK counterparts.

• Among boroughs, Newham claims increased by most compared to the same period last year (+17k).

• Among parliamentary constituencies, West Ham claims increased by most compared to the same period last year (+16,985), followed by Tottenham and East Ham.

Summary of latest labour market data (2)

The ONS has published new analysis on people temporarily away from paid work, who are included in employment figures but who did not work in the reference week, for example, furloughed workers. This shows:

• In the three months to June 2020, 7.3 million (22.3%) of those in employment were temporarily away from paid work (+16.1pp on the year);

• Younger (16-19) and older workers (70+) saw the biggest increases on the previous year.

• London was the region with the lowest share of people in employment away from work (19.3%) and the region with the smallest increase on the previous year (+12.4pp).

The ONS has also published UK data on actual hours worked, number of PAYE employees, vacancies and redundancies which overcome some of the data limitations that we discuss in Slide 4. These statistics, mostly available at the UK level only, show that:

• Between March to May 2019 and March to May 2020, total actual weekly hours worked in the UK decreased by 191.3 million – the largest fall on record since the series began in 1971.

• In July there were 730,000 fewer people in paid employment than in March 2020 and 114,000 fewer than in June 2020.

• Nominal regular pay for the April-June period fell for the first time since records began in 2001.

• Redundancies in the UK rose 30,000 on the year and 27,000 on the quarter, reaching a total of 134,000.

• For May to July 2020, there were an estimated 370,000 job vacancies in the UK (+10% on April-June period).

The full report can be found here - https://data.london.gov.uk/briefings/labour-market-update-for-london-august-2020/