The unemployment rate in Caerphilly County Borough is higher than the average for Wales, new data reveals.
But while several studies suggest that Brexit is damaging consumer confidence, employers across the country keep hiring – pushing the UK employment rate to its highest in more than 44 years.
The latest ONS data shows that 5.2% of people aged between 16 and 64 and actively looking for a job were unemployed in Caerphilly in 2018 – around 5,000 people.
Those figures were worked out as a monthly average across the year.
That’s higher than the average across Wales, where it was 4.5%. In the UK as a whole, unemployment stood at 4.2%.
Fewer people were out of work in Caerphilly than in 2017, when the rate was 6.1%.
There were a further 28,000 people on average considered inactive in the area last year, as they were not actively seeking work for at least four weeks.
Full-time workers in Caerphilly earned a median weekly salary of £504 in 2018, compared to £519 across Wales.