Second monthly rise in numbers claiming unemployment benefits in Northern Ireland

The latest Labour Market Statistics, published on Tuesday morning, also showed that wages are failing to keep up with rapid price increases. This comes after a senior economist warned that the Northern Ireland economy may already be in recession, with the wider UK economy set to follow. A spokesperson for the Department for the Economy said: "In October 2022, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 36,100 (3.8% of the workforce), which was an increase of 1.4% from the previous month’s revised figure. The October claimant count remains higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020 (by 21.1%)." An official measure of the unemployment rate, however, showed a “statistically significant” decrease over the past year, however, The Labour Market Statistics meanwhile, published by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency on Tuesday, showed that the unemployment rate for the period July to September had in fact decreased by 1.3 percentage points. A spokesperson for the Stormont economy department said: “The latest Northern Ireland seasonally adjusted unemployment rate (the proportion of economically active people aged 16 and over who were unemployed) for the period July-September 2022 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 3.0%. This was an increase of 0.3 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and a decrease of 1.3pps over the year. The annual change was statistically significant.” In terms of earnings, wages are up an average of 6.7% compared to the same time last year. But with inflation running at more than 10% this means earnings are failing to keep pace with the rise in expenses. A spokesperson for the department said: "Earnings from the HMRC PAYE indicated that Northern Ireland employees had a median monthly pay of £1,967 in October 2022, an increase of £10 (0.5%) over the month and an increase of £117 (6.3%) over the year." The Ulster University economist Dr Esmond Birnie, commenting on figures from the UK's Office for National Statistics that were published on Friday and showed that the UK economy as a whole shrank by 0.2% between July and September, said there was "some ground for deducing that the local, regional economy is already in recession".