Unemployment by Constituency December 2014

From this month the Library has included out-of-work Universal Credit claimants alongside people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance within its headline count and rate of unemployed claimants for parliamentary constituencies, to give a better indication of constituency unemployment.

The denominators used to calculate constituency claimant rates have also been updated, in line with constituency population estimates for mid-2013 and new Census data for Scotland. Therefore the claimant data shown in this edition of Unemployment by Constituency may not be comparable with that shown in previous editions and may differ from figures published in other sources.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance or not in employment and claiming Universal Credit decreased by 23,000 between October and November 2014, to 916,700.

The unemployment rate was 6.0% in August-October 2014. The ILO measure of unemployment was 1.96 million people, down 63,000 from the previous quarter and down 455,000 from the previous year.

The number of people in employment was 30.80 million in August-October 2014, up 115,000 from the previous quarter and up 588,000 from the previous year. The employment rate was 73.0%.