LONDON—The UK’s unemployment rate fell to a 43-year low in the three months to June, but pay growth slowed to its weakest in nine months, official figures show.
The statistics, released by the Office of National Statistics on Tuesday, Aug. 14, showed there had also been the sharpest annual drop in the number of EU workers in Britain since 1997.
High job vacancies have also failed to translate into strong job growth, which is bad news for the Bank of England, which increased interest rates earlier this month.
“This will not be what the Bank of England will have wanted to see, as one of the justifications for [its] decision to hike rates earlier this month was that it was expecting wage growth to start lifting off. This hasn’t happened yet,” Emma-Lou Montgomery, an associate director at Fidelity International, told Reuters.
However, the figures showed that productivity had grown at the fastest annual rate since late 2016, with the number of people whose main job was a zero-hours contract falling by the most since 2000.
The unemployment rate fell to 4.0 percent in the April-June period, the lowest since the three months to February 1975 and beating economists’ forecasts for it to hold steady at a previous low of 4.2 percent.
“Overall the data could be described as mildly positive for the pound, and the currency quickly spiked up to its highest level of the day not long after the release,” David Cheetham, chief market analyst at currency broker XTB, told Reuters.
“This seemed to be a bit of a knee jerk reaction to the unemployment figures and the gains have been pared as traders digested the miss in wages,” he added.
With Britain due to leave the European Union in March next year, the data showed more EU nationals leaving Britain, with the number working in the country down 86,000 from a year ago.
From The Epoch Times
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