The Northern Ireland jobs market is in “robust” condition with year-on-year increases in median pay and the employment rate, it’s been claimed.
According to HMRC figures for July, median monthly pay in Northern Ireland reached £2,249 in July, a rise of £164 or just under 8% over the year.
And the Labour Force Survey unemployment rate was 1.9% for April to June, a fall of 0.7 percentage points over the year, and the first time the rate has dropped below 2%.
But median monthly pay had dropped by 3.5%, or £82, month on month, HMRC said.
The agency’s data also showed there were 807,700 PAYE employees in Northern Ireland in July, up 0.1% over the month and 2.3% over the year.
Rachel Richardson, employment expert and director in the employment team at law firm DWF in Belfast, said the figures showed “a robust market against a difficult economic backdrop”.
Despite the drop in the unemployment rate, the separate claimant count climbed by 6% on the revised figure for June to reach 41,000.
In percentage terms, the number of people on the claimant count was now 4.2% of the workforce.
And the 41,000 on the claimant count was up 37.4% than the pre-pandemic count of March 2020.
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The NI Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra), which published the data through the Department for the Economy (DfE), said the increase were largely down to a rise in the administrative earnings threshold for Universal Credit in May.
Nisra said that over the year to July, 2,550 redundancies were confirmed, nearly double the figure of 1,340 for the year before.
It said that while the level was substantially higher than the previous year, it is similar to the levels seen in the decade before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, there were 2,820 redundancies proposed in the 12 months to July, down 28% on the 3,940 of the year before.
According to the Labour Force Survey, the employment rate, which provides the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work, decreased by 0.3pps over the quarter but rose by 1.2pps over the year to 71.6%.
The economic inactivity rate – those who are neither working nor available to work – was 27.1%, down slightly on the year before.
Mark McAllister, director of employment relations services at the Labour Relations Agency, said the growth in confirmed redundancies meant there could be no cause for complacency about the state of the jobs market.
However, there were some optimistic signs. “There is little doubt that growth is on the menu… what remains to be seen is if it ever reaches the table.”