Gordon Brown will be forced to fight the general election against the backdrop of accelerating job losses, a report warns today.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says that unemployment rates will increase sharply as the public sector feels the impact of cost-cutting. Dole queues will increase to 2.8 million in the second half of the year, a rise of up to 50,000 a month. The forecast, which dashes hopes that Britain is poised to make a strong recovery from recession, discovered that more than a quarter of firms are still planning redundancies.

The CIPD report comes ahead of new unemployment figures on Wednesday. The CIPD found that those employers who intended to make redundancies were planning to axe 6.2 per cent of their workforce in the first three months of 2010. More than a quarter said they planned to make redundancies, while a further fifth could not rule it out. The survey also found that one in ten companies intended to outsource jobs abroad this year to countries with cheaper workforces.