Bank of England governor Mervyn King announced yesterday that there were "signs that growth has resumed in the third quarter", however, experts have warned that unemployment trends will always fall behind the rest of the economy.

BPIF research and information manager Kyle Jardine said: "The employment figure will always lag behind the rest of the economy, so even after the economy does pick up, employment will suffer for a bit longer."

Meanwhile, in an interview with the BBC, economist Howard Archer, of HIS Global Insight, said: "The sharp overall economic contraction suffered between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009 will continue to weigh down on the labour market for an extended period."

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the jobless total increased by 210,000 in the three months to July 2000, taking the unemployment rate to 7.9%, the highest in 14 years.

However, Jardine offered some hope for the beleaguered print sector in that company closures are expected to come down when the Q3 figures come out next month.

Jardine said that he expected UK print company closures for the current quarter to fall marginally from the 99 businesses that failed in Q2 to "around 90".

He said: "In Q2 2008, the quarterly insolvency figure was 58, but then in Q3, when all this started, that figure jumped to 93 and in Q4 it went up to 105 as a lot of companies really went to the wall.

"In the first quarter of 2009, it was still up quite high at 96 and in Q2 there were 99 closures. We've got another month to go until we get the Q3 figures, but I think they will be around about 90 or so and hopefully those figures will start coming down a bit now.

"Last year, because of the credit crunch, we didn't really get the Christmas seasonal upturn that usually happens in the industry, but hopefully this year we'll have one."