The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has warned that government spending cuts will push unemployment numbers up by a fifth to almost the three million mark.
The warning comes two weeks before George Osborne’s ‘emergency’ budget, schedule for June 22, wjhere he is expected to announce a raft of spending cuts, centred around the public sector.
CIPD has revised its unemployment predictions from 2.65m to 2.95m by the end of this year and the organisation expects this level to be sustained until 2015.
John Philpott, CIPD chief economic adviser, said:
“Although tough fiscal medicine is unavoidable and may boost the UK’s long-run economic growth and job prospects, reliance on cuts in public spending rather than tax increases as the primary means of cutting the deficit makes the short-term outlook especially bleak for those individuals and communities already suffering the greatest hardship in society.
“Given what we know historically about the way in which the social burden of unemployment and stagnant average income growth is shared across individuals and communities, the prospects for those already suffering the most disadvantage seem particularly bleak.”
Current unemployment levels are around 2.5m.
