London: Britain’s unemployment rate remains at 4.4 percent, official data showed Thursday, as the country’s new Labour government vowed action on helping people into work.

Unemployment in the three months to the end of May was unchanged from the three months to the end of April, the Office for National Statistics said.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall hit out over data contained in the ONS release that showed 9.4 million people classed as economically inactive.

She said the UK was “standing alone as the only G7 country where the employment rate is still not back to pre-pandemic levels”.

“This is a truly dire inheritance which the government is determined to tackle,” she said.

The ONS data revealed that a near-record 2.8 million people are out of work owing to long-term sickness.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s centre-left Labour party, elected this month after 14 years of Conservative rule, has set out plans for a new national jobs and career service to get more people into work.

Thursday’s data was meanwhile analysed for clues on when the Bank of England might start to cut interest rates after UK inflation returned to the central bank’s target of 2.0 percent.

The ONS figures show “the UK continues to see wage growth far outpace headline inflation”, said Lindsay James, investment strategist at Quilter Investors, which is helping to raise expectations that the central bank will delay cutting until September rather than next month.

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