The ONS today released the employment figures and the headline figures remain encouraging (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/october-2013/index.html).
Seasonally adjusted unemployment for 16-64 year olds stands at 7.9%, 0.2% down on last year and a -0.1% change on the quarter. There's also been a big jump in full time employment (3% YOY, 1.0% on the quarter) and a fall in part-time employment (1% YOY, 0.2% on the quarter) which, along with increased employment numbers implies that people may be moving back towards full time employment.
But I think the best indicator (and source of the happiest news) remains to be the vacancy rate. For 17 out of the last 20 reporting periods the number of vacancies has been increasing and this was again the case for Jul-Sept (+6,000, 1.2% change on last quarter and 12.5 YOY).
There are now 2.0 vacancies per 100 jobs (compared to 2.3-2.5 pre crash and 1.6 in late 2009). After a slight shudder with the last report, its good to see the numbers back on trend although I'm going to predict it won't be until around Q1/2 2015 that we see vacancy numbers back to pre-crash rates.
For any American readers I treat the vacancy rate as a British version of your quit rate that the BLS (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm)puts out. The argument for the quit rate being a good indicator is that people only quit their jobs when they have positive expectations of the labour market. The vacancy rate doesn't quite capture the optimism (or lack thereof) of workers but remains a decent proxy.
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