Three million families in UK are living in jobless households

London, Aug 28 : One in seven children in Britain -- almost 1.8million -- now live in totally work-free households, the majority with a single parent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

There has been barely any reduction in the number of households where all adults are out of full-time work in the past five years, the figures show, The Telegraph reported.

Using the Labour Force Survey of employment, researchers found that 15.8 per cent of all households in Britain that contain at least one person of working age had no one in full-time employment. It means that there is complete unemployment in a total of 3.06m families in which someone should be able to work.

This represents an improvement of just 0.2 per cent since 2003. Due to the fact that there are now half a million more families living in Britain, there are actually 43,000 more working-age families who have no one in employment than there were five years ago.

The survey, which was carried out in the three months up to June, found that there 4.29million people of working age - 11.4 per cent of the entire workforce - were living in workless households.

The study titled "Work and Worklessness Among Households", also found that 40 per cent of all single-parent families have no one in employment, while the rate of worklessness among couple households was just five per cent.

The employment rate for lone parents was found to be 56.3 per cent, compared to 71.7 per cent for married or cohabiting mothers.

The Work and Pensions minister, Anne McGuire, said: "The number of workless households is down 15,000 on the year and 185,000 since 1997, as more and more people are being supported off benefits and into work. We've cut unemployment to almost half what it was a decade ago and the numbers on out-of-work benefits have fallen by over a million."

ANI