Sophy Ridge and Wilfred Frost announced some Breaking News on their Sky News show (Image: Sky News)

Sophy Ridge and Wilfred Frost interrupted their show on Sky News to confirm a huge rise in the UK’s unemployment figures. In a huge blow to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves , unemployment has risen by 5.1%. Looking earnest Frost announced: “We want to get you to some breaking news here…Unemployment figures have just been released for the month of October.” He then welcomed the channel’s business and economic correspondent Gupreet Narwan to analyse the huge increase.

“Just in a bit of context – that’s the highest unemployment rate now we’ve had since early 2021 so the deep, dark days of the pandemic, of the lockdown. And give you a sense of what’s happened over the past year, when we talk about 5.1% unemployment rate in the year to November, about 171,000 staff roles have disappeared from payrolls.Now that’s a mixture of people retiring and not being replaced. It might be people who have actually been sacked. It might be employers just not kind of pulling up the ladder on on graduate recruitment, but 171,000, 38,000 on the month alone. So this is quite significant,” NArwan explained.

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She continued: “(It) is a lot more competitive out there to get a job. So not only are there more people now looking for work, but vacancies, we look back to kind of 2022, they’ve been pretty much consistently shrinking quarter on quarter.

“We’ve had a bit of let up here and there. Most recently, the figure showed us the vacancies were flat, but they’re still lower than they were back in 2022.

“The best way to really think about that is to look at the ratio of unemployed person to jobs now. There are 2.5 unemployed people for every job that’s out there. This time last year, we were talking about 1.8, and I think it’s just worth saying that all of this is really hurting young people most, because it’s entry level work.

“If you look at those vacancies, it’s at the entry level that they’re really shrinking. There’s a lot going on there. We know things like retail, hospitality, which have been really hit hard by employment taxes, by next increases, they have been shrinking, and they’re the ones that give opportunities to young people often also have graduate jobs,” she explained.

Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have been dealt a blow with an increase in unemployment figures (Image: Getty)

“There’s a lot going on structurally in the employment market, about with AI, maybe next has encouraged some businesses to accelerate investment in AI, because now employment is so expensive.

“But there’s loads going on here, and this is before we even get to talk about all the people that aren’t even showing up in the employment figures because they’re not even looking for work,” she said.

Frost interjected: “To summarise…the first line of the ONS statement says the overall picture continues to be one of a weakening labour market.

“And the statement goes on to say the fall in payroll, the increase in unemployment has been seen, particularly among some younger age groups. So completely agree with that summary.”