Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, July 2017

By Buckinghamshire Business First
17 August, 2017

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count fell for a second successive month in July taking the number of out of work Buckinghamshire residents claiming either Job Seekers’ Allowance or Universal Credit to 2,955.

At 0.9 per cent of working age residents Buckinghamshire’s claimant 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 13.9 per cent, more than double both the national and regional rises (4.6 and 5.7 per cent respectively).

Table 1: Claimant Count, July 2017

Source: DWP, 2017

There were 4,798 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in July, 314 (6.1 per cent) fewer than in June and 1,062 (18.1 per cent) fewer than in July 2016. At the national level vacancies have increased by 5.6 per cent over the last year, although at 1.6 Buckinghamshire’s vacancies per claimant remain well above the national rate of 1.1.

Despite this fall in July, the total number of job openings in Buckinghamshire over the last year is 9.2 per cent higher than in the preceding year, at 63,559. Job openings have increased in eight of the nine major occupational groups, led by an extra 1,651 openings for professionals. Openings for caring and personal service occupations rose by 692, or 21.3 per cent. At a finer level of detail the largest increases were recorded for chartered accountants, teachers in secondary education, bookkeepers and IT user support. The highest rates of increase was recorded for financial technicians and education support workers.

The most commonly advertised roles in July were programmers and software development professionals (231), nurses (149), IT user support technicians (126), care workers and home carers (122), other administrative occupations (120) and sales account and business development managers (101). Over the last year the most sought specialised skills have been customer service (5,282 openings), Microsoft Excel (5,071), business management (3,719), Microsoft Office (3,442), project management (3,072) and sales (2,499). The most sought baseline skills have been communication skills (15,034), ahead of organisational skills (8,931), planning (4,804), being detail orientated (4,441) and team work and collaborative working (4,4237.