Jobs

In his blog earlier today, Fraser Nelson argues: ‘The UK jobs miracle is happening mainly due to radical welfare reform – the type Labour ducked in office..Under Labour, record numbers of people in work were celebrate as an end in itself – but most of the increase was accounted for by immigration. So more jobs did not mean less poverty – not if a quarter of Glasgow and Liverpool were still languishing on the dole at the peak of a boom. This time, it’s different. The welfare reforms are restoring the see saw link between jobs and dole queues.’ I suppose I should by now get over the fact that

George Osborne rather glossed over the single most solid piece of good news in the Budget today: the Jobs Miracle. His pensions announcement means that tomorrow’s papers are likely to skip over it too. But it’s worth looking at – the government seems genuinely baffled as to why so many people are finding work. As I wrote in my last Telegraph column, the Treasury does not seem to recognise a supply-side, cross-departmental success when it bites them on the nose. I’m just back from the annual Spectator Budget presentation, sponsored by Aberdeen Asset Management. We spoke a lot about this – the below graph sums it up… As my earlier

This was supposed to be the year of strife, strikes, misery and more. Instead, to the surprise of Britain’s politicians, things have instead gone badly right. I look at them in my Telegraph column today, and here are the top points:- 1. Crime plunges With the austerity and the unemployment, internal government reports predicted that Brits would respond by unleashing a crimewave. Instead, recorded crime has fallen to the lowest level in 25 years: [datawrapper chart=”http://www.seapprojects.co.uk/charts/3571387552215.html”] 2. We’re doing more with less People think public services are getting better, in spite of substantial cuts in local authority spending. The doomsayers were wrong – thanks to resourceful British public servants, more

Unemployment is down, there are fewer people claiming jobseeker’s allowance, and more people are in work than ever before. So, the top line on today’s employment figures: They’re good news. The real picture is more nuanced. Unemployment is down by 4,000 on the previous quarter, a figure that is dwarfed by the margin of error. We might reasonably expect the real number of unemployed to be anywhere within 85,000 above or below the 2.51 million quoted. There have been nine straight months with fewer people claiming jobseeker’s allowance, but the unemployment rate is still 7.8% – just where it was in August 2012, and a meagre 0.1 percentage points lower than

Today’s jobs figures are pretty unambiguously good news. The number of people in work rose by 154,000 in the last three months of 2012 to a new record high of 29.73 million — surpassing pre-recession peak by 158,000. And unlike other recent rounds of employment growth, this wasn’t driven by a rise in part-time workers (their number actually fell by 43,000). But there are still a couple of reasons cause to greet this good news with caution. Rising employment at a time of economic stagnation has come at the expense of earnings. Adjusted for CPI inflation, average weekly earnings have fallen by 7 per cent in the last five years,

News of 800 job losses at Honda’s Swindon factory are making the headlines — factory closures always do. They can leave scars that never quite heal, and for those affected it will be no comfort at all to know that there are today more people working in the UK economy than ever before. But it’s true. As the below graph shows, the British economy is not actually shedding jobs at a particularly high rate. Even during the boom years, there were about 1,500 redundancies every day. What mattered was that the number of jobs created was greater. But there is an in-built new bias, because the jobs created tend to

The number of people in work in the UK hit 29.6 million in August-October – the most ever — according to today’s figures from the Office for National Statistics. So despite GDP still languishing 3 per cent below pre-recession levels, employment has fully recovered, with half a million jobs created in the last year: The rise in employment has been thanks to the private sector more than making up for the job cuts in the public sector. The numbers don’t quite back up David Cameron’s claim that there are 1 million more private sector jobs than when he took office — to get that he must either be using January-March

Today’s employment figures don’t contain much new to shout about. The number of people in work — although it rose by 100,000 on the previous quarter — is actually down very slightly from last month’s record high (but still above the pre-recession peak, just). Unemployment fell by 49,000 from Q2 to Q3, although that’s well within the Labour Force Survey’s margin of error (so we can’t be certain that it fell at all). The best news in today’s figures — from the government’s point of view — is probably that the headline unemployment rate is now 7.8 per cent, very slightly below the 7.9 per cent rate when the coalition

Employment has almost entirely recovered to its pre-recession peak, according to today’s new figures. Total employment for May to July stood at 29.56 million — up 236,000 on the previous three months and just 12,000 shy of the 29.57 million peak of April 2008. This recovery is thanks to the expansion of the private sector, which has added over a million new jobs in the last two years, and now employs 381,000 more people than it did before the crash. Public sector employment, meanwhile, has been cut by 628,000 since the coalition took over, and is now at its lowest level since 2001. The scale of private jobs growth —