Britain’s unemployment rate drops to 7.8%

Britain’s unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent in the third quarter of this year, down from 8.0 percent in the previous three months and 8.2 percent a year earlier, official statistics showed on Wednesday. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said 2.51 million people were jobless between July and September, down by 49,000 during the second quarter and by 110,000 on a year earlier. “This is another good set of figures. We’ve seen the number of people in work increase by 100,000 and youth unemployment is below a million again,” Employment Minister Mark Hoban was quoted by BBC as saying. But he said that there was “no room for complacency and that much hard work” remained to be done to get people back to work. “There are still some real challenges out there. We still need to tackle … long-term unemployment,” he said. The ONS also said that total pay rose by 1.8 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period of last year, still lagging behind the rate of inflation which stood at 2.7 percent in October.