Employers struggling to fill posts despite slight rise in joblessness

NORTHERN Ireland’s unemployment rate has risen slightly to reach 4.3%, according to the latest figures.

A labour market report from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) showed the rate of joblessness from June to August was down from 4.7% on a year ago.

But the rate was up from 3.4% over the quarter before, although Nisra said it still compared favourably with 5.9% recorded two years ago.

The local long-term unemployment problem was more severe than in the UK as a whole, with around half of the total unemhere

ployed for a year or more, compared to 25% in the UK.

At 2,889, the number of redundancies over the past 12 months was 50% higher than in the previous year.

The province also has the UK’s worst economic inactivity rate at 27.5%, with around 322,000 people neither in work nor looking for work, due to factors including illness and retirement.

The figures also showed that in September, the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits, including some claimants of universal credit, was 28,100 — a fall of 100 on August’s revised figure.

Tina McKenzie, the policy chair of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in Northern Ireland, said: “While unemployment has slightly increased this quarter to 4.3%, it is still low by historic standards and employers are reporting difficulty in filling vacancies.”

She insisted businesses would need flexibility post-Brexit so that they could employ workers from the EU if they were having difficulty filling vacancies.

“Last week, the FSB joined with other business organisations in calling on the Government to ensure migration policy is flexible and that business owners can hire the EU workers they need to grow their business.”

Richard Ramsey, Ulster Bank chief economist, said the unemployment rate had risen steadily since an all-time low of 3.1% in early 2018.

The numbers covered in the unemployment rate had gone up by 7,000 over the last quarter to reach 38,000 — the biggest jump in six years.

After increasing to 4.3% from 3.5% six months ago, joblessness was above the UK’s 4% rate for the first time in a year.

Mr Ramsey added that the employment rate had reached a seven-month low of 69.2%, and he agreed a lack of workers could become a problem post-Brexit.

“EU nationals are a major part of Northern Ireland’s workforce. Stronger economic growth and higher wage opportunities in the Eurozone have seen a significant number of these non-Irish EU nationals head to Germany and Poland, for example,” he added.

“Given Brexit and the UK’s desire to restrict migrant labour, the challenge for the Northern Ireland economy is increasingly going to be job replacement (and retention) rather than job creation.”