LONDON (AP) — Britain's unemployment rate rose sharply to 5.8 percent in the three months to September, as the economic slowdown hit the job market and raised the number of jobless to its highest in over a decade, official figures showed yesterday.

The total number of unemployed people in Britain is now 1.82 million — up from 1.79 million in the last figures to August, Britain's Office for National Statistics said.

The rate rose from 5.4 percent in the previous quarter.

Unemployment is growing in sectors across the board — from pharmaceutical companies to car manufacturers to finance workers — as employers try to reign in spending to weather the economic downturn.

On Tuesday, Virgin Media and Yell Group PLC announced 3,500 job cuts, and GlaxoSmithKline said it would be closing one of its England plants by 2013, resulting in 620 job losses.

According to the statistics office, a total of 156,000 workers were made redundant in the three months to September — up 29,000 from the three months to June.

"They're not very good figures and that's a disappointment," government employment minister Tony McNulty told Sky News. "We're doing all that we can to get people back into work as quickly as possible."

But analysts predict there is worse to come, as mergers and collapses in the banking sector take a huge bite out of financial sector jobs. The Center for Economics and Business Research predicts that 62,000 financial jobs will be lost by the end of next year.

As a result of the widespread losses, many economists believe the number of unemployed is likely to break the 2 million mark by the end of the year.

The unemployment data is yet more evidence that Britain is on the brink of a recession.

Last quarter, the British economy shrank by 0.5 percent, putting the country halfway into a technical recession — defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth.

"We're heading into a pretty nasty recession, and it's just natural that the fall in the level of output will push unemployment up," said Jamie Dannhauser, British economist for Lombard Street Research, who predicts the unemployment rate will peak at around 7.2 percent at the end of next year.