Northern Ireland’s latest labour market statistics smack of ‘nothing to see here…just move along’. Other than the record number of redundancies proposed in 2020 (11,000), there are few signs that the economy is in the midst of an economic crisis. Indeed, many of the indicators point to an improvement. For example, the unemployment rate and the number of individuals claiming unemployment related benefits is falling. Meanwhile the total hours worked and the number of employees on payrolls continued their upward trends. Talk of a labour market recovery, however, is premature. The Chancellor recently stated that the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Similarly, the labour market will deteriorate before a sustainable recovery takes hold. Unprecedented employment support measures, such as the Job Retention Scheme (JRS) and the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS), largely inoculated the UK and NI economies against a severe labour market shock. But once these measures are withdrawn a surge in unemployment in the second half of the year is inevitable.
