U.K. Seen Facing Toughest Employment Market in Two Decades, Forecast Says

By Gregory Viscusi - Dec 28, 2011 7:01 AM GMT+0700

Britain faces the “toughest” job market in two decades with the number of working people likely to fall by 120,000 in 2012, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said.

“The U.K. jobs market will be weaker than at any time since the recession of the early 1990s,” John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the CIPD, an association for human-resource professionals, said in a statement. “The combination of worsening job shortages for people without work, mounting job insecurity and a further fall in real earnings for those in work may test the resilience and resolve of the U.K. workforce far more than it did in the recession of 2008-9.”

The number of people out of work will reach 2.85 million by the end of 2012, with the unemployment rate rising to 8.8 percent, the CIPD said. Government measures to boost youth employment and to get the long-term jobless back to work may help the targeted populations, though won’t have a net effect on total employment, it said.

British unemployment rose to a 17-year high in the three months through October, with 2.64 million people out of work and a jobless rate of 8.3 percent, the Office for National Statistics said earlier this month.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net