Seasonally adjusted claimant unemployment fell in Birmingham last month to 29,199 or 5.8%. This is now made up of JSA claimants and Universal Credit claimants, with UC being introduced for new claimants since May. Unfortunately ward based information currently only includes JSA figures and this will steadily become a smaller portion of claimant unemployment. As a result I’ll stop reporting these figures, until they include UC numbers. Instead I’ll give the Yardley Constituency figures which do include both JSA and UC claimants. In July the figure was 2,531 or a claimant rate of 5.2%.

The Birmingham claimant rate remains higher than that in all the other core UK cities. The next worse is Liverpool at 5.5%. Greater London is 2.5% and the UK average is 2.4%