The prospect of an August increase in interest rates from the Bank of England has loomed larger after the latest official figures showed that strong jobs growth had pushed the UK’s employment rate to a fresh record in the first three months of 2018.
Despite the slowest growth in more than five years, the Office for National Statistics said there were 32.34m people in work in the first quarter of the year, an increase of 197,000 on the previous quarter and up by 396,000 on the first three months of 2017.
The UK’s employment rate rose by 0.4 points to 75.6% in the latest quarter, the highest since modern records began in 1971. A majority of jobs created were full-time posts.
