The number of British people out of work and claiming benefit unexpectedly fell last month, bringing the jobless rate down to its joint lowest since 1975.
The British Office for National Statistics said today the claimant count fell 3,100 in July to just 949,600, whereas City economists had on average predicted a rise of 2,300.
The new level is only 4,000 away from February's record low and brings the unemployment rate down to 3.1 percent, the same as the downwardly-revised figure for June and the joint lowest since July 1975.
The resilience of Britain's labour market has surprised many observers who expected the economic slowdown around the turn of the year to push up unemployment, but that has not happened.
And employment has continued to rise, with the numbers in work rising to 28.5 million in the three months to June, the highest since records began in 1979. Employment has been boosted by an expanding workforce, at least in part due to higher immigration.
In the hard-hit manufacturing sector, however, employment was down 4.5 per cent, or 174,000 jobs in the three months to June from a year earlier. The sector has borne the brunt of the downturn in the world economy.