UNEMPLOYMENT soared to a postwar record this month as thousands of school-leavers swelled the dole queues and workers were laid off. The underlying level of adult unemployment in Britain, after seasonal adjustment, rose by 49,400 on last month’s figure to reach 1,467,400. This is the biggest monthly rise for nearly five years, and brings the underlying total of unemployment to 6.2 per cent of the workforce. It is expected to rise still father.
The figures provoked uproar in the House of Commons, but Ministers refused to concede that the Government was to blame for the dramatic rise in the jobless. Mr John Biffen, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said after the figures were announced that they were “the price we must pay for continuing inflation”.
The increase of school-leavers on the unemployment register is bound to continue next month. It is likely to bring the total of those seeking first jobs to a record. The 133,139 increase in unemployed school leavers in June was a record monthly rise. The increase in June last year was just more than 100,000. Unemployment has been rising sharply since last autumn. Many economists believe that the number of unemployed will top 2 million next year and could continue rising in 1982. Officials yesterday blamed much of the rise on continuing high pay rises, which they said are pricing people out of work. But they also drew attention to the effects of the global recession on world job prospects.
Mr Len Murray, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said that the unemployment figures were the result of “two disastrous budgets”. The Government will probably be faced with more opposition with the numbers out of work already at levels not experienced since the 1930s and still climbing steeply.