Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, August 2017

By Buckinghamshire Business First
13 September, 2017

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count fell by 25 in August to record a third successive monthly fall in the number of out of work residents claiming either Job Seekers’ Allowance or Universal Credit.

At 0.9 per cent of working age residents, Buckinghamshire’s claimant count remains less than half the national level, ranking 3rd lowest among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships and 6th lowest among the 27 county council areas. Over the last year Buckinghamshire’s claimant count has risen by 10.8 per cent, the lowest rate of annual growth recorded since November 2016, as shown in chart 5, but still more than double both the national and regional rises (3.9 and 4.8 per cent respectively).

Table 1: Claimant Count, August 2017

Source: DWP, 2017

Five of the six wards in Buckinghamshire where the claimant count is not below the national rate are in High Wycombe. However, the town has seen the number of claimants rise by 8.4 per cent over the last year, compared to 12.0 per cent for the rest of the county. Overall, the claimant count has risen by 10.1 per cent in Buckinghamshire’s urban areas in the last year but by more than a third, to 600, in rural areas. More than a fifth of Buckinghamshire’s claimants now live in rural areas, up from 17.3 per cent in August last year.

There were 4,715 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in August, 83 (1.7 per cent) fewer than in July and 174 (3.6 per cent) fewer than in August 2016. At the national level vacancies have increased by 19.1 per cent over the last year, although at 1.6 Buckinghamshire’s vacancies per claimant remain well above the national rate of 1.1.

The most commonly advertised roles in July were programmers and software development professionals (236), other administrative occupations (163), nurses (134), business sales executives (128), IT user support technicians (110), sales account and business development managers (90), and marketing associate professionals (90). Over the last year the most sought specialised skills have been customer service (5,284 openings), Microsoft Excel (5,091), business management (3,748), Microsoft Office (3,381), project management (3,124), and sales (2,942). The most sought baseline skills have been communication skills (15,327), ahead of organisational skills (8,873), planning (4,502), team work and collaborative working (4,508), and being detail orientated (4,441).