George Eaton mentioned it over at the Staggers, but the “record high employment” in the last set of jobs figures isn’t quite as good as it appears. Most of the increase was due to either population growth, or the astonishing rise in the number of people on “government supported training and employment programmes”. The Morning Star’s Rory MacKinnon dug deeper into that latter rise:
The remainder are, as mentioned earlier, the aforementioned poor sods on unpaid placements, unpaid workers in family businesses and the self-employed. In fact, Mr Hoban’s claim of a drop of 50,000 Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants in the last quarter – the figure from which the unemployment rate is calculated – coincides with a combined rise in these three categories of… 50,000. Even the surge of 35,000 new self-employed entrepreneurs is hardly a sign of a booming economy – it’s due in no small part to the government’s drive to move Job Seekers Allowance claimants onto their New Enterprise Allowance for start-up businesses. Keeping a business afloat for long is a difficult feat for anyone in the current economy, let alone people with no nest egg who’ve now been told to take out business loans. We’ll see how well that particular policy works out once the scheme’s lenders start calling in their final repayments in 2015.
MacKinnon also has a nice point on the problem of using the total employment, rather than percentage in employment, as the headline figure. Click through and give it a read.
In the rush to publish on the headline figures, various statistical confusions can get rather lost in the mix. We have seen that with the “boost” in private sector employment seen from the recategorisation of further education college – which, while well publicised at the time, is now rather ignored when people talk about “one million new private sector jobs since the election” – and we are seeing the same thing again with the employment programmes.
No matter where you stand on the effectiveness or morality of such programmes, it is clear that they are not employment. An increase in the number of people taking part may (or may not) be cheering, but it is not the same as getting people back into work.
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