Unemployment in Britain fell sharply again to fresh record lows in the three months to January but the re-emergence of big City bonuses pushed earnings growth to the highest in over two years.
Data from the Office for National Statistics released on Wednesday showed the International Labour Organisation measure of joblessness tumbled by 33,000 in the three months to January to 1.436 million, just shy of a record low set in March to May 2001.
But the unemployment rate dropped to 4.8 percent, the lowest since records began in 1984 and a figure handing a gift to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown who was set to present his annual budget to parliament at 1230 GMT.
"The labour market continues to benefit from the strength of the economy. The only disappointing element continues to be the decline in manufacturing employment," said Howard Archer, economist at Global Insight.
The news came just as the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee released minutes of its March interest rate meeting showing it voted 9-0 to keep borrowing costs unchanged at 4.0 percent this month, after raising them in two steps since November.
The new unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the industrial world and comes in spite of a slowdown in the global economy over the past three years.
The country's other measure of unemployment known as the claimant count, showed its ninth consecutive monthly fall, dropping by 6,600 to just 885,200, the lowest since 1975. The jobless rate was steady at 2.9 percent.
There was also good news on the employment front as the numbers in work grew by a hefty 121,000 in the three months to January to a record high of 28.27 million.
But average earnings growth unexpectedly surged to 4.4 percent in the period from 3.5 percent in the three months to December. That was the highest since September 2001 and pushed gilt and interest rate futures down on the perception that it made further interest rate rises more likely.
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