Unemployment in Scotland is four times higher than official figures suggest, a new report has warned.

The country’s official jobless rate is just 3.6 per cent – but does not include the more than 350,000 Scots who are neither in work nor looking for a job due to circumstances outside of their control.

The figures were compiled by the Centre for Cities think-tank which analyses regional divides across the UK.

The report found Dundee has Scotland’s highest hidden unemployment rate at 16.3 per cent, followed by Glasgow at 16.1 per cent and Aberdeen at 15.6 per cent.

Edinburgh, which is one of the UK’s best performing cities, has a much lower hidden rate at 9.1 per cent but this is still more than three times its official unemployment rate.

The Centre for Cities said that while some sectors were experiencing a recruitment crisis there were still parts of the country facing a shortage of available jobs.

Daniel Johnson, Scottish Labour finance spokesman, said: “Hidden unemployment is detrimental to the people affected and Scotland’s wider economy.

“The Scottish Fiscal Commission has been clear that Scotland’s economy has been lagging the rest of the UK due to poorer workforce participation, this data underlines that fact.

“The SNP has the levers to deal with this. Skills policy, education policy and enterprise support should all be targeted at helping people into work and skilling up working people into better paid work. After 15 years in power, the SNP have failed to even register this issue.”

Want to see more SNP fails? – Education Matters