LONDON, Aug 13 - Unemployment in Britain unexpectedly fell to a two-year low in the second quarter of the year, further dampening prospects of further interest rate cuts. The Office for National Statistics said the ILO measure of unemployment fell 42,000 in the three months to June from the previous three months to 1.458 million, the lowest since the second quarter of 2001. That left the jobless rate steady from the previous month at 5.0 percent but that was also the lowest for two years and demonstrates the surprising resilience of the country's labour market to the economic slowdown sweeping the globe.
The claimant count measure of joblessness, which counts those actually drawing "dole", fell 8,800 in July, confounding predictions by City economists of a small rise. On that measure, 939,200 Britons are out of work, or 3.1 percent of the workforce. Employment, too, continued to perform well with 63,000 net jobs added in the economy in the second quarter, bringing the total in work to 27.92 million, the highest since records began in 1984. There was further good news from the average earnings data which showed a slowdown in wage growth in spite of the tightness of the labour market. The ONS said earnings grew 3.1 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, down from 3.5 percent in the three months to May. The data are the latest in a run of positive data since the Bank of England cut interest rates to 3.5 percent last month. Most analysts think another cut is now highly unlikely.//