According to the CIPD/KPMG survey of employers' the jobs market in the UK is getting rapidly worse. This should not come as too much of a surprise.

It should be remembered though that this survey is now a bit historic and was undertaken in a period of particularly bad economic and financial market news. I would suggest that this news is slightly redundant (excuse the pun) and we should look to more recent indicators as a better reflection of what is going on.

The survey asks respondents their plans for recruitment and redundancies in the first quarter of 2009. It seems strange to me then that they would release this information on 9 February when we are already half way through the quarter.

"The latest quarterly CIPD/KPMG survey of employers’ recruitment and redundancy plans indicates that UK job prospects are deteriorating ‘at an alarming rate’ while the size of average pay rises is shrinking.

The winter Labour Market Outlook (LMO) survey of 892 UK employers, conducted by Ipsos Mori at the turn of the year, finds that more than one in three (36%) plan to cut jobs in the first quarter of 2009 – double the proportion expecting to make job cuts at the time of the previous LMO survey last autumn.

The LMO records a negative balance of -9 percentage points between the proportion of employers planning to cut jobs (36%) and the proportion planning to hire additional staff (27%). This is the first such negative balance recorded in the five years since the LMO survey began in 2004.

The latest LMO survey also finds that employers intend to keep a much tighter rein on pay increases in the coming months. Those who plan pay reviews expect staff pay to increase on average by 2.6%, much lower than the 3.5% average increase expected last autumn. But as many as one in eight employers don’t intend to conduct a pay review at all in 2009."

Source: www.cipd.co.uk