UNEMPLOYMENT across Liverpool city region has fallen for the fourth consecutive month – but the number of people returning to work slowed markedly in December.
Just 57 people fewer claimed jobseeker’s allowance last month, a fall of 0.1% across the six local authorities. The falls in the months from September to November were 802, 641 and 448 respectively.
There are now 55,896 claimants in Liverpool city region, an unemployment rate of 6.1%.
St Helens led the way with a 1.0% drop, while Liverpool, Knowsley and Sefton also recorded slightly-reduced claimant counts.
Wirral’s small gain, of 82 claimants, follows three much larger monthly falls which saw nearly 800 people come off the JSA register.
However Halton continued its struggle with reining in unemployment. It is the only authority in the region that has a claimant count higher now than during the region’s peak in the summer.
And although its rise in December was small – only 0.7% – it has now seen increases in 15 of the last 18 months, with an net increase of 89%.
Liverpool city region’s rise in the same period was 56%, compared with an North West increase of 76%.
Alan Tomlinson, partner at Liverpool-based insolvency practitioners Tomlinsons, said: “Today's figures are very encouraging in terms of the medium and long term economic outlook but there is more pain in the pipeline in the short term.
“We were approached by a significant number of businesses in the second half of 2009 and many of these are now terminal. Unemployment could therefore rise again in the months ahead.
“It’s this long tail of company failures that will need to be worked out of the system before we can say the economy is firmly back on track.
“Today's figures are hopefully the beginning of the end of the recession.”
Nationally, the claimant count fell for the second month in a row in December, down by 15,200 to 1.61m, the biggest monthly fall since April 2007.
The number of unemployed people is more than half a million higher than a year ago, today’s data from the Office for National Statistics showed.
The news was not all good, with the number of people in work falling by 14,000 over the latest quarter to 28.9m, the lowest figure since last summer.
