2020 witnessed the fastest and deepest recession on record. But unlike output, the labour market has not followed the usual recession playbook. Unprecedented employment support has kept unemployment surprisingly low. Indeed, 2021 has already seen some encouraging signs on the labour market front. For example, proposed redundancies in Q1 have slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile the Ulster Bank Northern Ireland PMI for March revealed the first increase in employment levels in 13 months. Given the successful rollout of the vaccine, business optimism has returned to levels not seen since before the pandemic. As a result, firms are gearing up for the recovery and hiring the right people is a key part of that.
Levelling-off. The best indicator of employee numbers is the HMRC PAYE data. This highlights the actual number of employees on payrolls. Having peaked at just under 754,000 in March employment fell by 16,500 to a post-pandemic low of 737,508 (-2.2%) in May. Since then however, over 40% of these losses, some 6,800 jobs had been clawed back by February 2021. Over three-quarters of this jobs recovery occurred in the three months to February. However, the flash estimate for March suggests this recovery may have stalled with payrolls slipping back by over 200 jobs to 744,065. The latter is almost 10,000 fewer than last March’s peak.
