Labour's record on employment (part1) - Half of new jobs are created by the state

The Times reports that:

"NEARLY three-fifths of the growth in jobs under Labour during a decade in power was directly or indirectly created by the state, new research shows.

Across the country as a whole, it says 57% of new jobs created during the period 1997-2007 were state or “para-state” — dependent on government spending .

In the West Midlands these jobs accounted for all of the rise in employment, with no new private sector jobs generated overall. More than 80% of new jobs for women nationally depended on the state.

The research, which was carried out at Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, concludes that Britain’s business model before the financial crisis in 2007 was “undisclosed and unsustainable”.

“We more or less knew that finance had made a negligible contribution to employment,” said Professor Karel Williams, one of the report’s authors. “We were intellectually curious about the gap between the official figures on public sector employment and what we call the para-state.”

The researchers define para-state employment as activities such as rubbish collecting or nursery education which depend for revenue on government funding, together with parts of private healthcare and other sectors partly dependent on government support.

It includes consultants employed by central government and local authorities who are officially in the private sector but whose work would disappear if the public spending taps were turned off.

In all, the researchers calculate that of the 2.24m jobs created in Britain under new Labour until 2007, fewer than 1m were true private sector jobs, while 1.27m were in this wider public sector. In the West Midlands there was a net fall of nearly 37,000 in private sector jobs, offset by a 105,000 rise in state and para-state work. In the northeast, 79% of new jobs were state-dependent, compared with 41% in London and the southeast. "

This Labour government's record on increasing employment looks somewhat less than impressive when you realise that over half the jobs created were public sector (or similar) and a large proportion were filled by immigrants at the expense of British workers.