The Office for National Statistics reports 76.6% of people aged 16 to 64 were in paid work, an increase from 76.4% in the past quarter. Early estimates for March reveal a slight chill in the labour figures, dropping by 0.06% – at the same time, higher than the same period last year.

Tom Hadley, director of policy at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC), underscored that the steady jobs market of December 2019 to February 2020 reflected “a very different situation” from current conditions. “Everything has changed since these statistics were collected,” Hadley said. However, he added, “what today’s ONS figures do show is that the fundamentals of our jobs market are sound. This will help us bounce back post-crisis”.

Offering a slightly different view was Lee Biggins, founder and CEO of CV-Library, who said: “Today’s figures might not be completely reflective of the current situation, but they do paint a worrying picture of where the UK labour market was heading in the first few months of the year. With both pay and vacancies dropping, we can see that businesses were already nervous because of Brexit and the start of Covid-19 social distancing measures.” 

He predicted “a real shift” in coming months “whereby candidates won’t hold as much power as they have done in recent years… Our own data shows that vacancies fell by 4.1% in Q1 2020, and this is likely to continue into the next quarter”.

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