Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, April 2019

By Buckinghamshire Business First
14 May, 2019

At 1.3 per cent of working age residents, Buckinghamshire has the 4th lowest claimant count rate among the 26 county council areas, ranking 2nd among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).

Claimant count rates range from 1.0 per cent in Chiltern and South Bucks to 1.6 per cent in Wycombe. There are now five wards in Buckinghamshire where the claimant count rate is above the national level; four in High Wycombe and one in Chesham (see the map at the end).

At the national level, the claimant count rose for a tenth successive month in April, taking annual change to 21.6 per cent, while Buckinghamshire saw its sixth successive rise, up 205 to stand at 4,090, the highest level since April 2014. The claimant count has now risen by more than a third (33.7 per cent, 1,030 claimants) in the last year, rising faster than at any time since December 2009. Buckinghamshire’s annual increase is the 6th highest among the 26 county council areas, ranking 7th highest among the 38 LEPs.

Table 1: Claimant Count, April 2019

Source: DWP, 2019

The number of job postings in Buckinghamshire fell for a third successive month in April to 3,795, the lowest monthly total since records began in January 2017, 45.5 per cent below the 6,957 posted in April 2018 (3,162 fewer job openings), with falls in openings in professional occupations particularly marked (see chart 7). There are now more claimants than job openings in the county for the first time since we began collecting this data in January 2017. There are now 0.9 job openings for every claimant in Buckinghamshire, compared to 0.5 across Great Britain, down from a high of 2.6 in March 2017.

The most commonly sought occupations over the last year have been other sales occupations (2,594 openings), ahead of other administrative occupations (2,193), other customer service occupations (2,127), programmers and software development professionals (1,771), nurses (1,669), other managers and proprietors in other service activities (1,491), and marketing and sales directors (1,489).

Over the last year, the specialised skills most sought by recruiters in Buckinghamshire have been customer service, specified in 7,536 job openings, or 18.3 per cent of the total, ahead of team work/collaboration (6,311, 15.4), and sales (4,841, 11.8). The most commonly sought baseline skills have been communication skills (15,123, 36.8), organisational skills (6,983, 17.0), Microsoft Excel (5,717, 13.9), and being detail-orientated and planning (5,348 and 5,338 respectively, both 13.0).