A quarter of a million people have been claiming jobseeker's allowance for more than one year, official figures showed today.
There are currently 245,370 adults in England, Scotland and Wales who have been unemployed and claiming the dole for 12 months or more - over double the number that were in this position at the start of the recession in January 2008.
The fresh figures paint a grim picture of the coalition government's much-vaunted economic recovery plan, which is based on the view that cutting public-sector budgets will pave the way for new private-sector job creation.
However the situation looks worse by the wider ILO measure of unemployment, which shows that 811,000 people in Britain are facing long-term unemployment, an increase of 110 per cent since the start of the recession.
A TUC analysis of official statistics shows that this rise is a result of hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost during the recession and insufficient new ones being created.
Warning that the situation is likely to get worse as the government's spending cuts put at least an extra million people on the dole, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The UK has 2.5 million people out of work not because we're a nation of work-shy scroungers without a work ethic, but because with an average five unemployed people chasing every vacancy, there is a distinct lack of jobs.
"The number of people who have been out of work for a year or longer has more than doubled since January 2008. Unemployed people are the victims here, not the villains.
"The government should stop blaming unemployed people for their predicament and start creating rather than cutting jobs."
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