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Although unemployment is very serious soon, which is why we're addressing it, with the ideas and the measures that we are. It would be much much worse if we were not taking the combined action that we as a government and the bank of England have been taking.
Lord Mandelson can argue all he likes that these jobless figures would have been worse if not for some of the stimulus measures that the government is taking. The fact remains that 2000 people who have lost their jobs everyday during the last year while youth unemployment that’s down to 938,000.
People between the ages of 16 and 24 now account for full 38% of those unemployed and that's gonna have searing repercussions across the whole society as the Order Commission warned earlier this week. The other thing worth noting about these jobless figures is that the disparity between the claimant count by those people who are signing on for job seekers' allowance, and the ILO measure which is a broader measure of those people who are without work but not necessarily claiming benefits is continuing. Now the government is looking at this already, and there are some suggestions that one may be the case. One theory is that people who've lost their jobs are simply depending on their partners rather than signing on for benefits themselves.
Now there are a couple of rays of hope. First of all, we've had earnings figures out today. Earnings figures in the 3 months to June were up to 2.5% and that's improvement on the previous situation, potentially that's good news for consumer spending. However it should be borne out that's within the private sector which is accounting for 80% of the workforce earnings are running rising by some 2.1%. The majority of that increase is in the public sector which again doesn't bode well for the government’s attempts to ease back on public spending.