38,000 households find work in slow recovery
THE number of households without a single working adult was 38,000 lower in the three months to June, compared to the previous year, as the UK’s labour market improved.
Yet there remained 3.88m households without an employed adult, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday, down from 3.92m in April to June 2010.
And there were 370,000 households in which no adult has ever worked, up 18,000 from a year earlier.
London has fared well compared to the rest of the country. There are 2,000 fewer households in the city without work than last year, despite the capital gaining 51,000 more households since 2010.
Among households with at least one worker, the news is good too – more have all adults working and nobody unemployed.
The generally positive news bucks the trend of recent years, which have seen worklessness soaring.
Pre-recession, around 17.5 per cent of households had nobody between the ages of 16 and 65 in a job. That figure hit 18.5 per cent in 2009 and 19.2 per cent in 2010, but now stands at 18.8 per cent.