Rishi will be walking with a cautiously optimistic spring in his step this morning, after the ONS announced unemployment has fallen by 182,000 between June and July, with overall figures for workers on payrolls 201,000 lower than pre-pandemic. Two weeks ago the Chamber of Commerce claimed one in five firms was planning to cut jobs as furlough wound down…

Contrary to their pessimism, Jonathan Athow, deputy national statistician for economic statistics at the ONS, said:

“There was no sign of redundancies starting to pick up in our survey data ahead of the furlough scheme beginning to wind down, and Insolvency Service figures for July suggest the same.”

“The world of work continues to rebound robustly from the effects of the pandemic.”

“The number of people on payroll was up again strongly and has now grown over half a million in the past three months, regaining about four-fifths of the fall seen at the start of the pandemic.”

Even more optimistically, Athow took to Twitter to point out there are further optimistic signs, with “high levels of vacancies”, which – if they feed through to more jobs – “should see increased employment in coming months”. He says to wait and see what happens as furlough continues to wind down, though reiterates there are no indications of large-scale planned redundancies “at the moment”…