The UK’s employment rate has exceeded pre-pandemic levels but key measures of productivity growth are worse than first thought, after official statistics were updated to reflect the growing population.
The Office for National Statistics has updated its measure of the labour market to take into account the 1.1 per cent growth in the working-age population, adding 484,000 people to the total.
The re-weighting, requested by the Bank of England, means the employment rate is 0.1 percentage points higher than first thought at 74.6 per cent and the total is 313,000 higher than before the pandemic.
The UK’s labour force inactivity rate, which measures people not in work and not looking for a job, was 0.1 percentage point lower at 22.1 per cent, while estimated unemployment