Jane Gratton, head of people policy at the BCC, said the figures showed the tightness in the UK labour market is not shifting significantly with job vacancies remaining at record highs, adding to the recessionary pressure businesses are facing.
“We have urged the Government to immediately reform the Shortage Occupations List. This will help businesses fill urgent job vacancies from abroad when they cannot recruit skilled people locally,” she said.
“Firms need to support over 50s to return to work and invest much more in training and upskilling. But politicians need to be realistic about the skills we need from outside the UK.
“It’s time for a sensible debate that looks beyond the headline immigration figures, as these include students and are skewed. They don’t reflect the real-life situation facing employers up and down the country.
“Brexit has given us control of our borders and Government must use the appropriate levers to help struggling businesses get the people they need.
“It’s no use talking about growth if we are not prepared to take action on it.”
Barret Kupelian, senior economist at PwC UK, said the labour market is showing some signs of cooling.
“Despite marginal growth in employment, the number of vacancies in the UK economy continued to decrease for a fifth consecutive month since summer this year,” he said.
“There are now as many vacancies in the UK economy as the number of unemployed. As the economy stagnates in the coming months, we expect the labour market to cool further with vacancies dropping further.”
Mr Kupellan said there has been a decrease in economic activity driven by the 50–64 age cohort.
“This was also the same age cohort that led to the increase in the economic inactivity rate when the pandemic began,” he said.
“This trend is likely to be driven by a combination of factors including treatment of underlying health conditions, higher nominal pay on offer due to the relatively tight labour market, and potentially negative wealth effects associated with lower asset prices.
“Finally, pay differentials continue to remain stark in different sectors of the economy. Average weekly earnings growth in the private sectors was 6.9 per cent in the three months to October compared to 2.7 per cent in the public sector. This difference was amongst the largest seen between the private and public sectors, and could perhaps explain why 417,000 working days were lost because of labour disputes in October 2022.”
