Members of the public walk past the Cineworld cinema in Leicester Square on October 05, 2020 in London, England.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The U.K. jobless rate jumped to 4.5% in the June to August period, the Office for National Statistics reported on Tuesday.
The unemployment rate was higher than the 4.3% expected by economists, according to a FactSet poll. The rate was 0.6 percentage points higher than a year earlier and 0.4 percentage points above the previous quarter.
The ONS said data shows the the employment rate “has been decreasing since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, while the unemployment rate and the level of redundancies have been increasing in recent periods.”
An estimated 1.52 million were unemployed in the latest quarter. That was an increase of 209,000 on a year earlier and 138,000 above the previous quarter.
Redundancies rose by 113,000 on the year and 114,000 on the quarter to 227,000. The annual rise was the biggest since the May to July 2009 period, during the global financial crisis.
