UK unemployment is rising. UK vacancies are falling. And yet seven in ten British businesses say they still cannot find the people they need.
The latest ONS data released this month tells a story that nobody in government or business is particularly keen to read out loud.
Nearly 1.76 million people are unemployed. Vacancies have dropped to 707,000, the lowest level since 2021.
More people are out of work. Fewer roles are available. And still, according to the British Chambers of Commerce, 71% of firms reported hiring difficulties in the first quarter of this year.
It is a structural mismatch. The people who need work and the work that needs people are not finding each other.
Not because the talent does not exist. Because the hiring process, the salary expectations, the geography, the training infrastructure, and in many cases the job description itself, are all pointing in the wrong direction at the same time.
Payrolled employees fell by 138,000 in the year to April 2026. Real wage growth is running at just 0.3% when bonuses are stripped out. The claimant count has hit 1.712 million and is still rising.
And businesses are still telling researchers they cannot hire the people they need. These things are all true simultaneously. That should make everyone uncomfortable.
What is actually happening is a labour market splitting in two. On one side, a growing pool of people who are available, increasingly desperate, and competing harder than ever for a shrinking number of visible roles. On the other hand, a set of specialist, technical and leadership positions that businesses cannot fill regardless of how many people are looking, because the specific combination of skills, experience and geography they are demanding simply does not exist in the volume they expect.
There are more people without work than there were a year ago. There are also more roles going unfilled than businesses are comfortable admitting. Both of those things are someone's failure. The question is whose.
The answer, inconveniently, is shared. Businesses that have not invested in training, that have relied on a post-Brexit immigration system that has made international hiring significantly harder and more expensive, that have held salary bands flat while the cost of living has not, and that have written job descriptions so specific that only a unicorn would qualify. And a government that has still not produced a credible long-term workforce strategy that bridges the gap between the available people and the roles that need filling.
A tight labour market rewards good hiring. A loose one punishes bad hiring less obviously. A structurally broken one lets everyone point at everyone else until the problem is too large to ignore.
We are at that last stage right now. The data is telling us clearly. Are we actually listening to it?