With talk of recession in some quarters, the Office for National Statistics picked an opportune moment to announce that unemployment fell slightly for the three month period up to February. This is good news for house prices, since much of the previous recession was caused by large-scale unemployment, something palpably not the case in the current economic climate.

The figures show the employment rate for working-age people in the UK up by 0.6 per cent on the same period last year, standing at 74.9 per cent. With 29.51 million people in paid employment, this was proportionally the highest figure ever recorded, and the figures for unemployment, claimant count, redundancy and inactivity rate for people of working age all showing a small but marked decline.

At the same time, there were 687,600 job vacancies for the three months to March 2008, the highest figure since comparable records began in 2001. Employers have been reporting a shortage of skilled candidates for some time, which is bad news for companies but encouraging for anyone concerned about media reports of wide-scale redundancies, since high employment will be a cornerstone of sustaining house prices. Furthermore, incomes are likely to rise as employers try to tempt the best candidates, and that will put more money in house buyers' pockets, in turn making stable property prices comparatively more affordable. The annual rate of growth in average earnings excluding bonuses was 3.8 per cent in February 2008, up slightly on the previous month's figure.