Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, April 2018

By Buckinghamshire Business First
17 May, 2018

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count fell by 40 in April to stand at 3,075. Over the last year the county’s claimant count has risen by 3.7 per cent, less than a third of the national rate of increase and the 3rd and 2nd lowest rate of increase among the 27 county council areas and 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) respectively.

While the claimant count rate remained unchanged at 0.9 per cent of working age residents, Buckinghamshire’s ranking improved to the 3rd lowest rate among county council areas and 2nd lowest among LEPs.

Table 1: Claimant Count, April 2018

Source: DWP, 2018

Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) claimants looking for work in sales occupations now make up 69.2 per cent of Buckinghamshire’s total, having accounted for just 24.4 per cent in April 2012 and 47.9 per cent in April 2016. There were 1,630 Buckinghamshire residents looking for work in sales occupations in April, 2.7 for every job posted. In contrast there were only 190 resident JSA claimants looking for work in managerial, professional and technical occupations compared to 4,287 job openings, 22.6 job openings per claimant.

There were 6,957 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in April, 25.6 per cent (1,417 openings) more than in April 2017 but 6.0 per cent (442) fewer than were posted in March 2018. There are now 2.3 openings per claimant in Buckinghamshire, compared to 0.9 across the UK.

The most commonly advertised roles in April were sales related occupations including retail sales representatives, with 277 openings, ahead of programmers and software development professionals (243), other administrative occupations (including administration assistants and clerks, 203), nurses (201), managers and proprietors in other services (eg betting shop managers or production managers in entertainment,193) and customer service occupations (171).

In the last year the most sought baseline skills have been communication skills (specified in 14,929 job advertisements), ahead of organisational skills (6,666) and planning (5,351). The most sought specialised skills were customer service (7,086), teamwork and collaboration (6,184) and sales (5,681).