UK services firms add staff in October, ending two years of job cuts
Growing workloads led UK services firms to hire additional staff in October, according to the PMI survey, ending a two-year run of job cuts in the sector.
UK services companies took on additional staff in October as bigger workloads pushed firms to expand their workforce, according to the latest PMI survey. The move marks an end to a two-year period in which the services industry had been cutting jobs.
The Purchasing Managers' Index survey, which tracks activity across the sector, pointed to rising demand as the main driver behind the hiring. Firms reported that existing workloads had grown to the point where they needed more people to keep up, a shift that reverses the reductions seen across the industry since the previous year.
The change in employment is a notable turning point for one of the largest parts of the British economy. Services account for the bulk of economic output in the UK, so a return to hiring within the sector is closely watched by economists as a sign of the wider health of the labour market and of business confidence.
The survey's findings suggest that firms are beginning to feel more confident about the volume of work coming in. Rather than cutting staff to control costs, companies in the services industry are now adding capacity to meet the demand they are seeing, which may signal that the pressures that prompted the earlier job losses have started to ease.
Source: standard.co.uk
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