The unemployment figure in Britain for the three months to September rose to 2.62 million, with youth employment crossing the million mark. The total number of jobless people between 16 and 24 years of age was reported to be 1.02 million by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
While the coalition government led by the Conservative party blamed the euro zone crisis for the high level, the opposition Labour party said the government should stop looking for excuses and tackle the crisis by going easy on spending cuts.
Employment minister Chris Grayling told Sky News, “If you go back four months, unemployment was falling, youth unemployment was below 900,000. We’ve seen a big slowdown in the economy, I think as a result of the crisis elsewhere.”
The official numbers revealed that youth unemployment had nearly doubled over 10 years.
The number was lowest in March 2001,when it was around 512,000.
Shadow chancellor Ed Balls from the Labour party said, “The British economic recovery was choked off well before the instability in the last few months in the euro zone. The government is cutting too far and too fast, and it’s pushing borrowing and unemployment up at the same time.”
Paul Kenny, general secretary for the GMB union, said: “The millions of workers without jobs face a miserable Christmas and a bleak New Year. For all the economic problems in other parts of Europe, the number of young people out of work is far higher in the UK than in other parts of Europe and is three times higher than in Germany. Instead of attacking pensions and employment rights and making it easier to sack people, the government should be pursuing policies to create jobs, which it is failing miserably to do. Where are all the jobs that were promised to make up for the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the public sector?”
The ONS numbers also reveal that female unemployment was at its highest in 23 years, at 8.3 per cent. The rise in unemployment figures was accompanied by a further bleak outlook for the economy, with Bank of England governor Mervyn King predicting GDP growth could fall to one per cent in 2011 and 2012 from an earlier prediction of 1.5 per cent.
Releasing the inflation report, King said, “The immediate impact of the decline in sentiment is that the outlook for growth of the world economy has worsened since August. That is also true here in the United Kingdom, where activity could be broadly flat until around the middle of next year.”
