CIPD - Signs of credit crunch hitting jobs, The Financial Times

CIPD in the news

Signs of credit crunch hitting jobs, The Financial Times

20 March 2008

The Financial Times reports on the latest ONS job statistics and the announcement that whilst overall employment has increased, average earnings growth has dipped slightly. A breakdown of the record 31.62m jobs in the economy also suggested the number of jobs in the finance and business services sector dipped by 5,000 to 6.65m during the final three months of last year - the first quarterly fall since 2002.

John Philpott, Chief Economist at the CIPD said: “The Workforce Jobs series shows that while the financial and business services sector was the main engine of UK job growth in 2007, as a whole the sector started to shed jobs in the final quarter.
"With the impact of the credit crunch intensifying and jobs in finance taking a big hit, this important source of job generation will dry up in 2008.
"All the forward-looking independent employment surveys now suggest that demand for staff in the economy as a whole will be lower this year than at any time for a decade.
"There may be no sign of this in the official headline employment figures but dig deeper and job prospects can be seen to have weakened."