Payroll figures show 19,000 fall during year of pandemic
MORE THAN 19,000 people have dropped off company payrolls across West Yorkshire in the last year.
According to Office for National Statistics figures, the number of people receiving wages through PAYE – HM Revenue and Customs’ system for collecting income tax from salaries – around 959,858 employees in the West Yorkshire area, which covers five local authority districts, were on company payrolls in February. That figure is 19,100 fewer than in February last year, just before the UK was plunged into its first Covid-19 lockdown.
The figures are an average of employee counts on each day of a given month and the two per cent annual decrease was still smaller than the average fall of 2.4 per cent across the UK.
Jobs in the tourism, hospitality, aviation and arts sectors were the worst hit but other sectors already had low levels of employment and “no part of the country escaped unscathed” a jobs expert has said.
“Inevitably, places with lots of jobs in hospitality, tourism, aviation and the arts have been hit particularly hard,” said Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies.
“However, many of those areas that have fared less badly had lower employment before the crisis and have even lower employment now. No part of the country has escaped unscathed.”
The drop was 693,000 nationally compared to the previous February, despite the number of employees on the payroll increasing slightly for the third month in a row after nine months of decline.
The labour market should see a recovery in numbers of workers being hired as parts of economy shut down by the pandemic start to reopen, Mr Wilson said.
He added: “But with nearly 5m people still to come back from furlough and nearly 2m people unemployed, we may well need more support in the coming months to get hiring going again.”