'loses momentum'

a rise in the number of the economically inactive - people who have stopped looking for work.

Damian Hinds, the employment minister, said: "The strength of the economy is driving an increase in fulltime, permanent jobs and a nearrecord number of people are now in work thanks to the government's welfare reforms. "When unemployment fell to 5% early last year, many people thought it couldn't get much lower, and yet it now stands at 4.3%."

But with growth in earnings lagging well behind the current inflation rate, the TUC general secretary, Frances O'Grady, said the government should raise the national minimum wage to £10 an hour as quickly as possible. "This is the seventh month in a row that prices have risen faster than wages. But ministers are still standing on the side-lines," O'Grady said.

Earnings excluding bonuses were 2.2% higher in the three months ending in September than they were in the same three months of 2016 - no change on the upwardly revised figures for the period ending in August. City analysts said the lack of any acceleration in earnings growth eased the pressure on the Bank of England to increase the cost of borrowing following the quarter-point rise to 0.5% earlier this month.

The slowdown in employment coupled with modest growth in the economy's output resulted in a sharp improvement in the UK's productivity rate, which was up by 0.9% between the second and third quarters of 2017 - its fastest rate of increase in six years.

John Philpott, director of the Jobs Economist, an economic consultancy, said: "The latest jobs and productivity figures suggest that UK employers are finally having to respond to much tighter labour market conditions as the economy edges closer to full employment. Although the economy continued to grow, there was no net hiring in the third quarter of the year, with businesses cutting full-time jobs and switching to increased use of parttime workers."

The ONS statistician Matt Hughes said: "After two years of almost uninterrupted growth, employment has declined slightly on the quarter.