Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment the Government has made of trends in the level of employment since June 2016.

The latest available data, released by the Office for National Statistics on 19 March 2019, shows:

• the level of employment for Nov-Jan 2019 at a record high of 32.7 million.
• the level of employment having increased between Mar-May 2016 (i.e. before the UK’s EU referendum) and Nov-Jan 2019 – by more than 1 million.
• the rate of employment for Nov-Jan 2019 at a record high of 76.1%.
• the rate of employment having increased between Mar-May 2016 (i.e. before the UK’s EU referendum) and Nov-Jan 2019 – by 1.7 percentage points.

To note: the statistics above are the headline statistics used by ONS: the level of employment covers the 16+ age group; the rate of employment covers the 16-64 age group.

The trends for the same period are shown in the table below: