The unemployment figures might not have hit the magic 2m mark but they still make grim reading. My colleague Simon Rogers has done some analysis on the figures and they show an increase of 54% in benefit claimants over the last year.
If you want to see how your part of the world is looking, we've put all the raw data together here. It's originally from the ONS, but we've just played around with it a little.
In the south east, something else is happening too. There are actually more jobs for men and less for women - if you look at London and the south east together, it works like this:
Men in employment - 4.4m, up 33,000
Women in employment - 3.6m, down 14,000
We've put the figures on Google docs.
