Jobs threat for business support

Advertising will be hit hard, the CEBR says.

More than half of UK jobs created in the business services sector during the past five years will be axed by 2011, a study suggests.

About 334,000 jobs will be lost in the sector because of the credit crunch and recession, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said.

Firms who worked for the public sector would suffer as spending by government bodies was tightened, it added.

The advertising industry is likely to be hardest hit, the CEBR said.

It forecast that this area alone would shed 15,000 jobs during the period, after suffering revenue drops of almost 4% in 2008.

'Hard to imagine'

The business services sector also includes industries such as property management, research and development, IT services, the legal sector, accountancy and management consultancy.

It has been one of the strongest performing parts of the UK economy in recent years, but this trend has been reversed with employment expected to be 8% lower in 2013 than at its peak in 2008.

This forecast is a sharp contrast to the 20% growth in employment and the 15% increase in output seen by the sector between 2003 and 2008, the CEBR said.

"Though most sectors in the UK economy will suffer from the recession, the dramatic reversal of fortunes for the business services sector from strong performance to significant losses would have been hard to imagine even at the onset of the financial crisis," said Arek Ohanissian, one of the report's authors,