UK jobs soar – but how many of these jobs are real?
If you look at the local level most of the indicators of economic performance are “heading south”. I have been puzzled for a while about why in the face of this employment seems to be growing. This article reveals part of the answer – and suggests it would be very interesting to scope out the rural urban distribution of the 100,000 or so “jobs” featured here:
…in the latest figures obtained by the Guardian, government-supported schemes accounted for about 100,000 jobs of about 500,000 created in the previous year. Of these, a substantial proportion – very likely a majority – involve people in unpaid work or training schemes, living on unemployment benefits.
These are by no means the only new jobs created over the year, but do make up a substantial proportion – and with the UK’s working-age population up by about 350,000 on the year, there are more people chasing jobs than a year before.
The ONS notes the difficulty of attempting to classify unemployment according to benefits or government job schemes: both are regularly changed by new governments, and vary hugely from country to country. Attempting to create international standards to accommodate these quirks would, in all probability, prove impossible.
The current approach, an ONS spokesman says, “has been applied as consistently as possible to our labour market statistics for over 20 years, despite many changes to government training programmes and work-related benefits”.
The issue it raises in the current climate, however – people on new unpaid schemes for the unemployed being counted as in-work – has not escaped the attention of the Department for Work and Pensions. The minister for employment, Mark Hoban, wrote to the ONS in November last year to encourage them to amend how it records the figures – though he said this would make little difference to the overall picture.
The UK’s phantom jobs, then, are not so much a result of nefarious manipulation of the figures, but instead arise because different people use figures for different purposes”