UK unemployment has stalled, but it’s set to fall again under the Conservatives
The nation's unemployment rate was heading a steep downward slope until the beginning of the year, but since January it has barely changed.
Over the four months ending in April, the Adzuna unemployment predictor estimates the proportion of people out of work went down from 5.6 per cent to 5.58 per cent – this amounts to just 5,000 additional people in employment, which is negligible compared to the 0.2 per cent and 0.1 per cent declines the Conservatives achieved from September to November and November to January, respectively.
The calculation is based on real-time coverage of more than a million job vacancies combined with information about visits to the Adzuna website, which acts as a search engine for job advertisements and is used by over five million people every month.
Adzuna's metric is used by Downing Street to analyse the state of the economy, and is six months ahead of the ONS figures shown in the graph below.
Road to recovery?
The figures won't come as the best news to the party, whose election campaign is centred on continuing the economic recovery it has achieved so far. But if they are re-elected, it looks like this stagnant period will have been nothing more than a blip – Adzuna reckons that under the Conservatives the rate will have gone down to 5.04 per cent by July, reflecting an extra 177,000 people in employment.