Unemployment has risen to 5.1 per cent and has been rising for 14 consecutive months.

This time last year, unemployment stood at 4.3 per cent and those paying the highest price are young workers.

In three months, unemployment among 18 to 24 year olds rose by 85,000, the largest increase in two years.

Redundancies have risen to their highest level since the pandemic, and private sector employment has been shrinking for more than a year.

These outcomes did not happen by accident.

Employers are telling us why they are so restrained in the face of uncertainty over taxation, rising national insurance costs and mixed messages from the Government ahead of both their Budgets.

Many firms stopped hiring new staff, and others cut jobs because taking on new staff has become unaffordable.

At the same time, public sector wages are rising at more than seven per cent, while private sector pay growth is slowing to under four per cent.

Resources, which are all created by the private sector, the public sector does not create wealth, are being directed towards expanding public sector employment even as the private sector the engine of job creation contracts.

This removes incentives to work and makes welfare a lifestyle choice.

Tax and welfare system that weakens the incentive to work. High taxes, making hiring harder while increasing welfare spending risks trapping people outside the labour market altogether, it is killing the jobs market.

Instead of encouraging the transition into work, the system discourages it. You know the story £71,000 a year in the private sector to be enough to make up for benefits if you have three children.

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So the private sector suffers, and that’s where wealth is created. And Labour’s policies seem deliberately to be exacerbating the situation.

Unsustainable increases in the minimum wage year, leading businesses to warn that higher wage price workers can’t be afforded, they can’t be paid for and it leads to inflation as well.

And these are the results of political choices made in Downing Street.

It is a choice made by Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer, and their choices that misunderstand basic economics, ignore employer behaviour and prioritise state employment and welfare over growth, enterprise and productivity.

The result is a weaker economy, fewer opportunities and a generation of young people being left behind.

We are in an economic doom loop as ever.

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