Cameron’s 1000 jobs
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading this programme from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which can turn around even the most suspect of statistics. This week, dating, milk, babies and spreadsheets. I am a man of many spreadsheets. In fact, I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my top favourite spreadsheets. But first, let's talk about jobs. Loyal listener Nicola emailed us this week at moreorless at bbc.co.uk to say...
I heard David Cameron's claim on the Radio 4's Today programme this morning that the Conservatives have... Created 1,000 jobs for every day we've been in office. I am a 54-year-old middle-class woman living in rural Bedfordshire and even I was driven to shout... at the radio. Which one of us is right, please?
Well, thank you for your question, Nicola. And here to help me answer it is one of those lucky people with one of Mr Cameron's new jobs, our cub reporter, Hannah Moore.
Well, it's true, I did start this job within the past five years, but I don't really think the government created it as such.
Hannah, we've got to play by the rules. All politicians like to claim credit for everything good that's happened during their tenure, so say thank you to the Prime Minister for your job.
Thank you. I wasn't really up to it.
So leaving aside the question of whether the government is responsible for creating these jobs, is the number true? Have 1,000 jobs a day been created since the coalition government came to power?
In short, yes. There were 31.5 million jobs in this country when David Cameron came into power and there are 33.5 million now. So that's just over 2 million more jobs now than in June 2010. That equates to almost 1,200 more jobs per day.
Did the Conservatives really create 1,000 jobs a day since 2010?
Well, I must confess that I was annoyed by Mr Cameron's statistical boast myself. And that wasn't because I thought it wasn't true. I assumed it probably was. It was because it's really unhelpful. I mean, there are more than 30 million jobs in the country. As you said, there are 365 days in a year. So there is a thousand jobs a day, a big number, a small number. What? It's just confusing.
So I wanted to put the number into context. And one way to do that is to look at how many jobs a day were created under Gordon Brown's government and Tony Blair's government.
Well, I think we know that Gordon Brown didn't do too well on that score. He was only Prime Minister for three years and Northern Rock went belly up just a few months after he started.
Yes, there were 555,000 fewer jobs in the country at the end of his premiership. So that's 500 jobs destroyed per day.
Ouch. And that, presumably, is one reason why David Cameron's job creation record is pretty good. He started from such a low point. But what about Tony Blair? I mean, whether by good luck or good leadership, he presided over a long economic boom.
Yes, but just under 900 jobs a day were created while Tony Blair was Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, well below David Cameron's nearly 1,200.
Well, well… Now, I think we know what Labour would say about this. Yes, there may be jobs, but they're not the jobs we want.
And they would have a point. There are far more people in part-time work who say they want to work more hours, for example, than before the crisis. And the picture on wages squares firmly with the Labour Party's criticism.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has just published a report on this, and it found that median hourly wages adjusted for inflation were still almost 5% lower in 2014 than in 2008, just before the recession. Median weekly wages were down even more. And by the way, the fall was higher for better paid workers.
Now, is that fall because wages are stagnant in the jobs that people already have, or is it because all these new jobs pay badly and are pulling down the median?
It's the latter, Hannah. People who've had the same full-time job all along have seen their real pay rising for the past four years. That's on average, of course. But we haven't seen that wage growth for the labour force as a whole. So that suggests that the new jobs aren't paying as well as we'd hope.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:47
2
Did the Conservatives really create 1,000 jobs a day since 2010?
1:47–9:57
3
How does job creation under Cameron compare to Blair and Brown?
9:57–12:15
4
Are new jobs mainly low-paid or causing stagnant wages overall?
12:15–18:18
5
Are teachers and nurses truly the UK's unhappiest workers?
18:18–22:07
6
Do ONS figures about the sex industry and national accounts add up?
22:07–27:37