Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, February 2018

By Buckinghamshire Business First
21 March, 2018

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count rose by 105 in February to stand at 3,075, the highest level since September 2014.

Despite this second successive monthly increase, at 0.9 per cent of working age residents Buckinghamshire’s claimant count rate remained the 3rd lowest among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships, ranking 4th lowest among England’s 27 county council areas. The annual rate of growth of claimants in Buckinghamshire fell to 5.1 per cent in January, the lowest it has been since October 2016 and well below the national rate of growth for a second successive month (see chart 6).

Table 1: Claimant Count, February 2018

Source: DWP, 2018

There were 6,492 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in February, up 7.2 per cent (536 openings) compared to February 2017 and up 23.1 per cent (1,221) compared to January 2018. The increase was not felt evenly across the occupational structure with administrative and sales occupations both falling by more than 10 per cent (116 and 101 fewer openings respectively), while openings for professional jobs rose by 318 (16.8 per cent) to account for more than a third (34.1 per cent) of all openings in the county in February. There are now 2.1 openings per claimant in Buckinghamshire and 0.8 for every unemployed resident.

The most commonly advertised roles in February were sales related occupations including retail sales representatives with 283 openings, ahead of programmers and software development professionals (263), secondary school teaching professionals and other administrative occupations (including administration assistants and clerks, both 177), managers and proprietors in other services (includes betting shop and plant hire managers, 162), and other customer service occupations (155). More than two thirds of Buckinghamshire’s Job Seekers’ Allowance claimants are looking for work in sales roles, predominantly in retail.

In the last year the most sought baseline skills were communication skills (15,464), ahead of organisational skills (6,950), Microsoft Excel (5,527), planning (5,494), being detail orientated (5,205), Microsoft Office (3,658), creativity (3,623), and problem solving (3,483). The most sought specialised skill was customer service (7,317), sought by recruiters to roles in all occupational classifications.