One of David Cameron’s favourite boasts is that “one million new jobs” have been created in the private sector since the coalition came to power. The claim appeared in his conference speech and he repeated it at today’s PMQs. It’s an impressive stat, cited by Cameron as proof that “our economy is rebalancing”. The problem, however, is that it’s not true.
The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that private sector employment has risen by 1.07 million in the two years since the coalition took office (the figures are for June 2010-June 2012), so, at first glance, Cameron’s claim might appear to be correct. But what the Prime Minister doesn’t want you to know is that a significant part of this increase was due to the reclassification of 196,000 further education and sixth form college teachers as private sector employees. As the ONS stated:
These educational bodies employed 196,000 people in March 2012 and the reclassification therefore results in a large fall in public sector employment and a corresponding large increase in private sector employment between March and June 2012.
If we strip out these 196,000 jobs, the increase in private sector employment is a less impressive 874,000.
Yet, far from correcting this error, Cameron compounded it by today boasting that there were a “million more people in work” than when Labour left office, a claim that takes no account of the 432,000 public sector jobs lost since June 2010 (who says there haven’t been cuts?). The true rise in employment is 462,000 (from 29,128,000 to 29,590,000), or 538,000 less than the figure used by Cameron.
After complaining for years about Gordon Brown’s manipulation of economic statistics, the government came to power promising a new regime of transparency. But Cameron’s willful distortion of the facts on employment suggests he isn’t prepared to practice what he preached.
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