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| UK unemployment total falls to 2.5m | UK unemployment total falls to 2.5m |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| UK unemployment fell in the three months to December, while the number in work also jumped. | |
| The jobless total fell by 14,000 between October and December to 2.5 million, href="http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_297429.pdf" >the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. | |
| The number in work rose by 154,000 to 29.7 million. More than 580,000 more people are employed than a year ago. | |
| The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in January fell by 12,500 to 1.54 million. | The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in January fell by 12,500 to 1.54 million. |
| Overall, the ONS said there were 29.73 million people in the UK in employment, of which 73% were working full-time and 27% were working part-time. | |
| In the three months to December, the unemployment rate fell to 7.8% - down from 7.9% in the previous quarter. | |
| The figures also show how much the UK economy has been transformed since the financial crisis and its subsequent recession in 2008. | |
| The ONS said that between October to December 2012, full-time employment was 378,000 lower than in the April-to-June quarter in 2008, the first quarter of the recession. But part-time employment was 572,000 higher compared with the same period. | |
| Pay squeeze | |
| "Economically inactive people who are not available for work, that's now at the lowest level since the early Nineties," Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC. | |
| "No-one is saying this is easy, but if you were in France or Spain or Greece... you would look at these figures and say I wish we were in that position." | |
| The number of long-term unemployed also fell to 879,000, with 15,000 fewer people that had been unemployed for more than one year. | |
| In terms of pay, the ONS said that "there continues to be a cut in the real value of pay" as inflation remains higher than pay increases. | |
| Average weekly earnings, excluding bonus payments and before taxes and other deductions from gross pay, were £445 in December 2012, up from £439 a year earlier. | |
| "Where we're seeing the weakness in the labour market and in the UK economy is on the pay side," said John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. "People are having to price themselves into jobs. | |
| "The economy is producing the same amount of output with far more people - that is called falling productivity." | |
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