Covid-19: NI job market improves as lockdown eases

Northern Ireland's job market showed significant signs of improvement in May as the economy reopened.

HMRC payroll data is the most timely and best single overall indicator of the labour market.

It showed an estimated 745,900 employees in May, the highest total since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

The number of employees has now been rising for six months but is still 0.7% below the February 2020 level.

The May figure was up by almost 5,000 - or 0.7% - compared to April.

That is about 10,000 above the recent low point which was reached in November 2020.

Other job market indicators are also showing signs of improvement.

The Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) had its first quarterly increase since December 2019, following four quarters of decline.

The QES surveys about 6,000 companies including all employers with 25 or more employees and all public sector employers.

It estimated there were about 771,000 employee jobs in March, up by 0.3% - or 2,000 jobs - on the previous quarter.

The introduction of the furlough scheme helped to stabilise the job market near the start of the pandemic crisis.

Those on furlough count as employed in the jobs market statistics and totalled about 90,000 at the end of April.

There is a risk that some of those people could lose their jobs as the furlough scheme is phased out in the coming months.

The statistics agency, Nisra, said not all the new data was positive.

It said: "Although most indicators have shown improvements in the short-term, there has been a recent uptick in redundancy proposals with 150 redundancies proposed in May and 360 proposed in the first two weeks of June.

"These levels of proposed redundancies remain well below the 2020 average of 920 redundancies per month."

Recent redundancies have been announced in the aerospace sector, which is expected to face the slowest recovery from the pandemic.