Other business sectors across Merseyside offering a steady flow of job vacancies include care home operators, logistics and warehousing businesses and hospitality. Tony McDonough reports

Liverpool city region job centres are reporting a significant number of job vacancies in retail – despite the gloomy headlines around the state of the high street.

Other business sectors across Merseyside offering a steady flow of job vacancies include care home operators, logistics and warehousing businesses and hospitality.

The insight into the local job market came as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that in the three months to November the number of people in work in the UK reached a record high of 32.54m.

There was 1.37m people unemployed during the quarter – a rate of 4% which is the lowest for 40 years. The rate was identical for the North West. Wage growth in November was 3.3% – the 10th month in a row it had outstripped inflation.

The number of job vacancies rose by 10,000 to a record high of 853,000 and the number of economically inactive people fell by 100,000 to 8.6 million, a rate of 21%, which is the lowest on record.

Other interesting figures from the data included a near record 71.2% employment rate among women and a halving of youth unemployment since 2010 and it also shows that 75% of jobs created since are full-time and permanent roles.

Clive Morris, a spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions in Merseyside, told LBN that the care sector was offering vacancies at locations across Merseyside while logistics and warehousing were focused on the south of the city region.

On the retail sector, he added: “What Jobcentre staff across Merseyside are telling me is there continues to be opportunities for jobseekers in retail despite the recent headlines on the health of the sector.”