According to figures issued on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), nearly three million people accounting for almost a tenth of UK workforce are reportedly working as many hours as they would have liked to in the third quarter of 2009, a sharp climb from the 2.1m over the same period two years ago.

This clearly signifies that substantial spare capacity is present in the labour market, and could cause a high level of unemployment for some time to come if employers increase staff hours in the recovery instead of hiring new people.

The ONS revealed that the underemployed figures accounted to 31.6m hours of extra "work wanted" in the third quarter, or 3.4pc of the total hours worked from July to September. This is 6.2 million hours higher than in the previous year.

Part of the rise is propelled by a increase to more than 1m in people who works as part-time employees because they cannot find full-time work - a trend that began growing three years before the recession.

The research also discovers 1.3m workers classed as full-time who would opt to work more hours, or take on an extra job or move to different work with longer hours. There are also other part-timers who would like more hours.

However, economists speculated today's monthly labour market figures to depict the jobless rate steady at 7.8 per cent of the workforce, after last month's surprise fall of 7,000 to 2.46m, revealed a Reuters survey.