Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, October 2018

By Buckinghamshire Business First
13 November, 2018

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count fell for a second successive month in October to stand at 2,930, the lowest level since December 2017.

At 0.9 per cent of working age residents, Buckinghamshire has the 3rd lowest claimant count rate among the 27 county council areas, ranking 2nd lowest among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). Over the last year Buckinghamshire has been the only LEP or county council area to see a fall in its claimant count. Buckinghamshire’s 0.3 per cent fall (10 claimants) was well below the rises of 19.5 and 23.7 per cent recorded across Great Britain and the south east region (see chart 6). There are now 2.2 local vacancies for every claimant in Buckinghamshire compared to 0.8 across Great Britain.

Table 1: Claimant Count, October 2018

Source: DWP, 2018

Buckingham now has the lowest claimant count rate, at 0.5 per cent, of any of the 650 Parliamentary constituencies in the UK, ahead of Beaconsfield (0.7, 16th), Chesham and Amersham (0.8, 31st), Aylesbury (1.0, 75th) and Wycombe (1.4, 164th). Over the last year, Buckingham’s claimant count has fallen by 18.1 per cent to 295, the highest rate of fall of any English constituency and the second highest overall behind Islwyn.

Over the last year the number of male claimants has fallen by 3.3 per cent, compared to a 4.4 per cent rise for women. Men now make up 59.2 per cent of all claimants in Buckinghamshire, the lowest share since records began in January 1986.

There were 6,472 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in October, 3.7 per cent more (459 openings) than in September and 13.9 per cent (789) more than in October 2017.

The roles most commonly advertised in Buckinghamshire in the year to the end of October have been other sales occupations (2,923 openings) ahead of programmers and software development professionals (2,475), other administrative occupations (2,093), other customer service occupations (1,955), nurses (1,836), marketing and sales directors (1,708), and other managers and proprietors in services (1,680).

Over the last year the baseline skills most sought by recruiters in Buckinghamshire were communication skills sought in 15,651 job openings, or 21.9 per cent of the total, ahead of organisational skills (6,965), Microsoft Excel (5,655), planning (5,604), and being detail orientated (5,317). The commonly sough specialised skills were customer service (7,680), teamwork (6,506), sales (5,463), teaching (5,096), and budgeting (4,286).