United Kingdom
Blanchflower sees jobless rising in 2010
By Reuters
Jun 1, 2009, 09:20

LONDON (Reuters) - Unemployment will continue to rise this year and next, adding some 100,000 more to jobless numbers a month, former Bank of England monetary policy committee member David Blanchflower said on Monday.

Blanchflower, who stepped down from the MPC at the end of May, said the current recession made the economic outlook particularly difficult to forecast but said he was concerned about rising unemployment.

"The worry is that we have lots of downside risks," he told BBC radio.

"I suspect we are going to see unemployment increasing through the rest of 2009, probably through much of 2010 as well, and these increases are going to be large.

"My view is that we are going to see something like an average of 100,000 a month for the next year or so."

Official data last month showed the internationally-recognised ILO measure of unemployment rose by 244,000 to 2.215 million in the three months to March, taking the jobless rate up to 7.1 percent.

The number of Britons claiming jobless benefit rose by 57,100.

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