British employers added a record 184,000 staff to their payrolls in December, showing little impact from the Omicron variant of coronavirus, while job vacancies hit a new record high, potentially fuelling the Bank of England's inflation worries.
The broader unemployment rate for the three months to the end of November fell to 4.1%, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday, below economists' forecasts in a Reuters poll for it to hold at 4.2% and its lowest since June 2020.
Financial markets see a greater than 80% chance that the BoE will raise rates again on Feb. 3 after its next meeting. More recently, a surge of COVID-19 cases linked to the Omicron variant of coronavirus has caused widespread staff absence and hammered demand in the hospitality sector. But most economists expect the ill-effects to be short-lived.
The ONS said it believed temporary factors which had distorted pay growth higher earlier in 2021 had now largely dissipated.
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