New figures from the ONS show the UK’s unemployment rate is now roughly 4.5%, compared to around 4% before the start of the pandemic – with the majority of industries across the economy seeing notable quarterly growth. Even so, the number of vacancies has also hit a record high, with over 1.1 million jobs available across sectors such as retail and manufacturing. The data shows there are 3.7 vacancies for every 100 employee jobs.

Reacting to the figures this morning, Rishi Sunak said:

“The number of expected redundancies remained very low in September, there are more employees on payrolls than ever before and the unemployment rate has fallen for eight months in a row.”

Some good news for the recovery, obviously, although the skill shortages in areas like manufacturing could threaten progress…

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article listed the pre-pandemic unemployment rate at 5%. This has been corrected to 4%.