Jobs

Private sector growth pushes employment to new record high

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

Employment has recovered from the recession, but wages haven’t

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

The great City of London exodus gathers pace

Why not tax the bejesus out of the City and tighten regulation? Yes, the bankers will moan — but it’s not as if they will go abroad. The tax rate may be low in Zug, but do our pinstriped friends want to actually live there? The City’s elite have their kids in British schools, the time zone is right for business and the global phenomenon of Planet London has attractions that outweigh marginal tax rates. So let bankers moan: they’ll stay. This is, more or less, the argument that you hear from MPs on all benches as they take a carving knife to the golden goose that is the City

Employment returns to pre-crash levels

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 —

Osborne pushes upbeat message on economy

George Osborne gave a speech to a CBI dinner in Glasgow last night. It wasn’t the ideal day to do it: the OECD did downgrade its growth forecasts for Britain to minus 0.7 per cent, having previously predicted a 0.5 per cent rise. But the Chancellor remained upbeat, saying: ‘The economic outlook remains uncertain but there are some positive sings. Our economy is healing – jobs are being created, manufacturing and exports have grown as a share of out economy, our trade with the emerging world is soaring, inflation is down, much of the necessary deleveraging in our banking system has been achieved, and the world is once again investing

Cameron should be proud of jobs rise

David Cameron said in Prime Minister’s Questions today that there have been 800,000 more private sector jobs under his government. This is almost true, and — I thought — worthy of elaboration. Government cannot, of course, ‘create’ jobs — all it can do is move jobs from the private to the public sector. Every penny of public sector salary is taken from the real economy, and is a penny that someone isn’t being paid (or isn’t being spent). Now, if you’re the BBC it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like the sky is falling in, because your own state-mandated budgets are being cut. That’s why the BBC had almost

How not to create jobs

The Keynes vs Hayek debate is at its sharpest on the issue of employment. Can government create jobs (as Balls says)? Or does large public sector employment simply displace economic activity that would happen elsewhere (as Osborne says)? A fascinating study has been released today by the Spatial Economics Research Centre at the LSE showing the damage done by public sector employment to the real economy. Drawing on a huge amount of local-level data over an eight-year period, it’s a serious piece of research that is worth looking into and deserves to impact our economic debate. 1. First, what is seen. In the short term, hiring someone to work for

A part-time recovery

Today’s jobs figures show a 105,000 rise in employment and a 45,000 fall in unemployment, from the final quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of 2012. Welcome news, although both figures are within the margin of error, meaning we can’t say with confidence that employment is indeed higher or that unemployment is lower. But even taking the figures at face value, there’s another cause for concern: the rise in employment is coming in part-time, rather than full-time, jobs. First, let’s take a look at that total employment figure, which has risen 105,000 since the last quarter and 219,000 since the general election: Second, the number of full-time workers: As

Unemployment is down but are prospects up?

The government has fallen on today’s numbers showing employment up by 53,000 and youth unemployment down by 9,000. This is the first quarterly fall in unemployment for over a year. One coalition source describes the news as a ‘good reminder of what really matters, both economically and politically.’ Certainly, these figures will provide David Cameron with some protection in his first post-Budget PMQs. Ed Miliband won’t be able to make his usual jobs attack. But politically one of the key questions will be who is getting these jobs. One of the worries for the coalition is that a huge amount of the new jobs that are being created are going

Labour miss out the details

Labour’s launch of its new youth jobs policy has been rather overshadowed by Harriet Harman’s inability to explain the costing behind the policy on the Daily Politics earlier: not a good look for a party trying to show that it is fiscally credible. But more interesting than the number behind the policy is how it marks an attempt by Labour to toughen up its position on welfare. Those young workers who have been out of work for a year will have to take one of these minimum wage jobs or have their benefits docked.



 On the Labour front, the interview with Ed Miliband in the Times today is also worthy

Unemployment’s high, but at least it’s stopped rising

So, new jobs figures out today. Which do you want first: the bad news, or the kind-of-alright news? The bad news is that employment’s showing no signs of growth: the total number in work has been stuck at 29.1 million since it fell there in the summer. It’s a touch better than the trough of 28.8 million we hit at the end of 2009, but still half a million below where we were when the recession hit. And we’re showing no signs of getting there any time soon: And the not-so-bad news? Unemployment’s slightly down on last month, which was slightly down on the month before. It’s not a big

Graduates struggling to get graduate jobs

Today’s ONS release will make pretty grim reading for students and recent graduates. It shows that the unemployment rate among recent graduates — those who graduated in the last six years — stands at 9.1 per cent, higher than the overall unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent. It’s even worse for those who graduated in the last two years — the unemployment rate among them is 18.9 per cent, up from 10 per cent before the recession. But there’s an even more worrying trend among those recent graduates who do find employment. In 2001, three-quarters of them were in ‘higher skill’ jobs — those requiring more than GCSEs. Now, less

Transcript: Grayling on work experience

On the Today Programme this morning, Employment Minister Chris Grayling defended the government’s Work Experience programme in light of the recent controversies around it. Here’s a full transcript of the interview: Evan Davis: Well how can work experience get such a bad name? A string of high profile companies have pulled out of one government scheme providing work experience for young people. The latest, retailer Poundland, has announced it is suspending its participation in the scheme although it’s not quite clear which scheme it is, because there are several government schemes for getting people, long-term unemployed or young, into work. Let’s see if we can clarify what is going on

Grayling mounts a robust defence

The Work Experience scheme is a sensible policy innovation. Giving the unemployed structure to their days, the chance to earn some experience and learn some skills is surely preferable to doing nothing for them beyond bunging them some money every week. Indeed, I would say that it was by far the more compassionate policy. Chris Grayling’s robust response to Polly Toynbee’s criticisms is a welcome example of the coalition taking on its critics. Grayling, who had a torrid election campaign, has recovered his footing at DWP and the Work Programme he is running is potentially transformative. It is based on the idea that the companies and voluntary organisations involved are

IDS defends his work scheme — but he may have to change it

Articles by politicians are often flat and passionless. Not so Iain Duncan Smith’s effort for the Daily Mail today. The welfare secretary sets about defending the government’s Work Experience scheme for unemployed young people, but it soon turns into a full-blooded attack on its detractors. ‘I doubt I’m the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those “job snobs” who are busy pontificating about the Government’s employment policies,’ he bristles, ‘They should learn to value work and not sneer at it.’ And there’s much more besides, including a warning against ‘a twisted culture that thinks being a celebrity or appearing on The

How can employment and unemployment go up at the same time?

The employment level has risen since the election, according to today’s figures — albeit only slightly, from 29.0m to 29.1m. But unemployment’s up too: from 2.46m to 2.67m. So how come we’ve seen both more jobs and lengthening dole queues? Well, that’s because the ‘economically active’ population (people who are in work or ‘have been actively seeking work and are available to start work if a job is offered’) has grown faster than employment has. There are now 31.8m people in the UK who fit that description, an increase of 320,000 since the coalition came to power. But with only a 110,000 rise in employment, that means the number of

The bias towards migrant workers

Why are you never served by a Londoner in a London branch of Pret A Manger? I asked this in the Telegraph recently, and yesterday’s Evening Standard had a great piece tracking down four who applied, and were rejected without an interview. Some suspect there is a bias in favour of immigrants: if your name doesn’t sound exotic, game over. I doubt that a company like Pret, whose most valued ingredient is the famous enthusiasm of its staff, can afford to discriminate in any way. But the wider point is a very serious one: that British employers have come to prefer immigrants, believing that they work harder. And that a

Why the government shouldn’t be confident that employment’s rising

No two ways about it: today’s employment figures are difficult for the coalition. The unemployment figure’s up for the seventh month in a row, and now stands at 2.68 million — the highest since 1994. And the unemployment rate — up to 8.4 per cent — is at its highest since 1995. It doesn’t look like getting better anytime soon, either: unemployment’s predicted to carry on rising at least until the end of the year, possibly matching the three million peak of the early ‘90s. In its defence, the government claims that employment is rising too. Today’s figure of 29.1 million in employment is about 150,000 higher than it was

James Forsyth

Cameron endures his monthly unemployment grilling

Downing Street is painfully aware that one PMQs in four is going to be about unemployment. Today, with the monthly figures having come out this morning, Miliband led on the subject. The Cameron-Miliband exchanges were not particularly enlightening. Miliband said ‘it really is back to the 1980s’ and Cameron mocked Miliband for being ‘so incompetent, he can’t even do a U-turn properly’. In the backbench questions, Cameron wasn’t put under much pressure. The news of the session came when he said in response to a question from Andrew Rosindell that the National Security Council had devoted a whole session to the Falklands yesterday. At the end of the session, there

Romney hit from all sides on investment career

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_evS-T-c35M I noted on Saturday that one of the main attacks the Democrats are employing against Mitt Romney revolves around his 14 years as head of Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm which he co-founded. The argument is that Romney made a fortune as head of a company that was responsible for the closure of businesses and the laying off of thousands of American workers. Romney’s rebuttal is that this is how free enterprise works — in a debate on Saturday, he said: ‘in the free economy, in the private sector, sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful… in the business I had, we invested in over 100