Official unemployment figures in Britain have dropped for the first time since last October, according to figures released by the National Statistics Office.
The number of claims for benefit in the month of January fell by 10,600 an average monthly decrease of 1000 over the past three months.
However, the overall ILO figures, which include people who are not eligible for unemployment benefit, increased by 34,000 while the rate of growth of average earnings in December 2001 was 3.3 per cent, down 0.8 percentage points from November 2001.
This was explained by a decrease in the Christmas bonus’s paid out by financial firms over the Christmas period. because of a huge drop in bonus payments by financial firms.
In all 151,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the three months to December, mainly in electrical and optical equipment, textiles, leather and clothing.
The number of people employed in British manufacturing has now dropped in an all time low of 3.7 million.