Once again, the latest data from the Office for National Statistics has shown that there has a been marginal improvement in the Scottish employment market.
Our unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in the three months to April and remains below the UK wide rate of 4.7%. The number of people in work is also now at the same level as the three months before the first lockdown in March 2020, which would seem to indicate that we are well on the way to recovery.
However hopeful these numbers may appear; we know that unemployment figures are still being masked by the furlough scheme. Official data show that at the end of 2020, nearly 289,000 Scottish employees were on furlough and provisional data is indicating that this number has been increasing monthly to over 362,000 at the end of January this year.
The much-afflicted hospitality and retail sectors accounted for roughly 40% of the furloughed jobs in Scotland and now that they have been able to resume trading at an increased capacity, we can assume that furlough use is on the decline, at least in these industries.
These sectors have also seen some of the biggest jumps in hiring demand, growing 1000% during the month of May for hospitality staff and 500% for retail when compared to the previous year.
In the wider job market, hiring demand continued to increase during May. 64,000 jobs were advertised online across Scotland during this month, a huge 174% increase year-on-year.
Speaking in today’s Herald, our Commercial Director, Gavin Mochan, notes that whilst hiring demand is on the rise the biggest concern for our recovery is the likely postponement of the county’s shift into Level Zero and the upcoming closure of the furlough scheme.
“From July employers will make an increasing contribution to furlough, with the scheme set to close completely by the end of September. Pleas to extend the job retention scheme in some form have been flatly rejected, perhaps undermining employers’ confidence in staffing up.”
It seems we must still play the waiting game to see if once furlough support is withdrawn, restrictions have been eased enough to allow businesses to bring back their full staff and avoid yet more redundancies.
You can read the full analysis by s1jobs on the Herald website.