To deflect outrage from the OBR’s horrendous forecast that 1.1m public sector jobs will be lost by 2018, in his Autumn Statement Chancellor George Osborne repeated the Prime Minister’s claim from September that ‘1.2m new jobs have been created’ in the private sector since the Coalition Government was elected – a claim which doesn’t stand up to examination with the true figure being 874,000: http://fullfact.org/factchecks/million_private_sector_jobs_PMQs_David_Cameron-28124
Moreover the vast majority of the private sector jobs are part time and/or self employed with the BBC estimating an actual increase of only 280,000 in the number of people working full-time for a private sector employer during the past two years:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19270299
John Philpot, on his Jobs Economist blog, states that Osborne is ‘even more adept than most of his recent predecessors at pulling the smoke and mirrors trick in order to make the fiscal arithmetic look better’. Although the OBR has lowered its forecast for the peak in unemployment from 8.7% to 8.3% it ‘nonetheless paints a very bleak outlook for the UK labour market in 2013. The number of people in work is forecast to be unchanged between Q4 2012 and Q4 2013, the employment rate is forecast to fall from 58.4% to 58.1%, the number of people unemployed is forecast to rise by 100,000 with the unemployment rate increasing from 7.9% to 8.3%’:
http://thejobseconomist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/autumn-statement-octopus-strikes-back.html?spref=tw&m=1
