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Written Question
Unemployment and Vacancies
Tuesday 6th December 2022

Asked by: Chloe Smith (Conservative - Norwich North)

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will make an assessment of the (a) number of job vacancies currently available, (b) ratio of unemployed people to vacancies, (c) ratio of economically inactive people to vacancies in each UK constituency.

Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)

The Department for Work and Pensions aims to help businesses fill their vacancies by supporting people back into work from unemployment and economic inactivity and by helping people to progress in work.

Data on job vacancies across the economy, unemployment and economic inactivity are produced and published by the independent Office for National Statistics (ONS). Unfortunately, the ONS do not publish vacancy numbers at constituency level (due to the design of their vacancy data collection); and do not publish information on unemployment/inactivity in every constituency (due to insufficient sample sizes in some local areas). The DWP does not hold equivalent information on these measures. Therefore, it is not possible to make the requested assessment of ratios of unemployed/inactive people to vacancies at parliamentary constituency level.

At national level:

  • Vacancies are currently at a near record high of 1.225 million (Aug-Oct ‘22) – up 429,000 (53.9%) on before the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The unemployment to vacancy ratio at national level is currently at 1.0 (Jul-Sep ’22) – near to the record low figure of 0.9 unemployed people per vacancy. This means that there is approximately 1 unemployed person per vacancy advertised by employers.
  • There are approximately 7.3 working age economically inactive people per vacancy (Jul-Sep ’22). This is near to the record low figure of 6.7. However, if we look at working age economically inactive people who state that they would like to work, this ratio falls to 1.4 working age economically active people per vacancy. This is near the record low figure of 1.3.

Therefore, our overall assessment is that the data suggests that the UK has a ‘tight’ labour market, with high labour demand and relatively low numbers of people out of work who are close to the labour market by historic standards. Therefore, the Department for Work and Pensions is reviewing what action it can take to increase labour market participation (to conclude in early 2023), alongside its successful core labour market regime, which has helped reduce the unemployment rate to a near record low of 3.6% (Jul-Sep ’22).