NI jobs market sees 'slight improvement'

The Northern Ireland jobs market saw a small improvement at the start of this year, the latest official figures suggest.

However, there are still 8,000 fewer people in employment than before the pandemic.

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

It shows an estimated 746,100 payrolled employees in February, an increase of 0.2% on January.

That follows other small increases in January and December.

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The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) said:"The latest data shows that the number of paid employees has increased in the most recent three months after remaining relatively constant between April and November.

"However, the number of employees in February remains 1.0% below the March 2020 total."

The number of paid employees reached a peak of 753,800 in March 2020, just as the pandemic began to have a major impact.

That number fell sharply by almost 15,000 employees over the month to April.

The fall would have been much worse without the furlough scheme under which the government pays the wages of employees unable to work due to the pandemic.

A different measure of the jobs market, the quarterly employment survey (QES), suggests that over the last year job losses have been concentrated in the service sector.

It suggest that about 10,000 jobs were lost in services and about 800 in manufacturing.

Retail and hospitality services will have accounted for the majority of that fall in jobs.

Both the payroll data and the QES do not cover the self-employed.