Record levels of employment. Plenty of jobs to be had but generous pay rises hard to come by. Britain’s labour market after the EU referendum looks a lot like it did before the Brexit vote. Anybody looking at the latest unemployment numbers would be hard-pressed to conclude there had been an in-out referendum on EU membership less than three months ago.
The latest data from the Office for National Statistics provide little evidence of any major disruption to the labour market either before or after 23 June. In the three months to July, there were 174,000 more people in work than in the previous three months, while the number unemployed fell by 39,000. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ONS figures are making economists more cautious in their assessments of the impact of the Brexit vote on the economy.
“Our first look at the post-Brexit-vote labour market shows a similar picture to the one we had before the vote,” said Laura Gardiner of the Resolution Foundation thinktank. “It could be some time before we see any ‘Brexit effects’ – good or bad – in the official figures.”
