Workers are set to face increasingly stretched working conditions as firms strive to maintain their existing output amid tight constraints on recruitment. That is the assessment of KPMG partner and head of business services Bernard Brown, in the wake of this week’s revelation that unemployment has risen by 15,000, bringing the grand total to 2.52 million. The new figures mark a distinct trend following the previous announcement, which exposed a rise of 70,000.

For Brown, the fall in employment comes as little surprise in the wake of the UK’s recent IMF downgrade. “What a difference a few weeks can make,” he said in a press statement. “Just eight weeks ago figures were encouraging greater confidence as employment improved for the sixth consecutive month. Yet with today’s figures marking a drop for the second month in a row, any hope of recovery has been dealt a blow. The mismatch between improving employment figures and UK GDP has been well and truly exposed as an anomaly – and with the data emerging so soon after the IMF downgraded its forecast for the UK’s growth prospects, it is likely that business confidence will falter.”

Brown predicts strained times ahead for the UK’s existing staffers. “The problem, of course, is that while employers are too cautious to recruit, those who are working will be stretched so far that productivity will suffer. With output low, employers will continue to hold back, making it difficult to see how the spiral can be broken. The hope must be that measures announced in last month’s Budget begin to have an effect and that the dampener created by this month’s April Showers are replaced by a sunnier outlook as the year progresses.”