Questions to the Mayor of London – answered at on 8 January 2021.
The Chancellor’s comprehensive spending review outlined bleak projections for the economy over the coming few months, particularly with regards to unemployment. Can you provide projected unemployment figures for London with comparisons to other UK regions?
We know from the latest ONS regional labour market statistics that London has seen the largest year-on-year rise in the unemployment rate (by 1.8 percentage points) by the end of October and that it has seen a much higher percentage fall in jobs in the period from March to September 2020 compared with the rest of the UK (3.8% vs. 2.6%).
Looking ahead, GLA Economics only produces projections for jobs in London rather than for unemployment rates and it does not produce forecasts for other regions or for the UK as a whole. The latest forecasts were published in the London’s Economic Outlook in December 2020 and show that between the first quarter of 2020 (pre-crisis) and the last quarter of 2020, around 250,000 jobs may have been lost in the capital. This figure may reach over 450,000 in the course 2021. A slow recovery in the labour market is expected to begin in the second half of 2021 although pre-crisis levels will not return until 2023.