Val Shawcross AM is the Labour assembly member for Lambeth and Southwark

Boris Johnson follows in the footsteps of Norman Tebbit and Iain Duncan Smith by blaming those looking for work for London’s unemployment. It’s the oldest trick in the Tory book.

Last time a Tory government pushed unemployment into the millions, Tebbit said people should get on their bikes to look for work that didn’t exist. Iain Duncan Smith said they should get on a bus.

And now – when there are 234,000 Londoners fighting for just 33,000 jobs – the Tory Mayor blames their lack of “energy and appetite for work”.

Johnson says in the Sun:

“the jobs are there and people need to have the energy to go out and get them”.

In case you missed the point, he goes on:

“There are large numbers of job vacancies. Why are young people not taking up those jobs? … Let’s talk about the work ethic”.

I’ve visited colleges. I’ve spoken to young people in my south London constituency and across the city and I know there is no problem with their “work ethic”.

What I do see and hear is a generation of young Londoners who are having their dreams and ambitions blocked by a government who sees them as surplus to requirements. There is a very real feeling that they’re being disregarded and sidelined.

Either Boris Johnson knows this but doesn’t care or he doesn’t have a clue about what is happening in the city he is supposed to govern.

There are more than seven people chasing every job vacancy in the capital. In some boroughs the ratio is just frightening. In Haringey, where last summer’s riots began, there are almost 30 people going for each vacancy. In Lewisham there are just 500 jobs for over 9,000 job-seekers.

That Boris Johnson has nothing to say about the circumstances that have led us to this dire situation is a tragedy for London.

Instead of bending over backwards to get people back to work and fighting for our young people’s future – by opposing EMA cuts or unaffordable university fees – the Tory Mayor blames them for their plight. He is blaming the victims of this government’s cruelty for the bleak future it has created.

Nothing better illustrates how out of touch the Mayor is than the way he compares an out of work graduate forced to work at Poundland for her benefits to his first job at The Times newspaper.

Johnson accuses 22-year-old Cait Reilly of “sneering” because she objected to working at the discount shop for nothing. And he implies that she is out of work, again, because she is lazy, saying:

“I couldn’t believe having left university that it really did mean getting up that early and working that long … It’s not forced labour – she’ll learn from it”.

As a new book about the Tory Mayor reveals, when he left Oxford “he had astonishing access to the drawing rooms of power and his dynastic tentacles went further than almost any young graduate of his age. Armed with these connections and many more … he was swiftly taken on by The Times”.

Unfortunately for Cait and the million other young people out of work, not everyone is lucky enough to have the Mayor’s connections or open doors. Boris Johnson and his colleagues in government are closing the doors of opportunity and blaming the young people they’re shutting out.

See also:

• 2012: The year ahead for young people – Alex Hern, January 7th 2012

• Cameron is pricing the young out of education and consigning them to the dole queue– Sally Hunt, December 14th 2011

• Unpaid internships are wrong: We need action, not words, from Clegg and Miliband –Ben Lyons, November 30th 2011

• Million young unemployed figure highlights enormity of the situation hitting our youth– Rory Weal, November 16th 2011

• Cameron and Osborne want the unemployed to work for £1.78 an hour – Alex Hern, November 10th 2011

On the face of it, today’s employment figures were mixed.

The unemployment figures were as bloody as expected, reaching 2,685,000 in the three months from September to November. This is an increase of 118,000 from June – August and the highest level since July 1994. This is the sixth month running to have seen an increase – if unemployment continues to rise at this rate it will reach three million by July.

• The number of unemployed women rose again, reaching 1,128,000, the highest figure since October 1987. The 59,000 increase is the largest since April 2009.

• The claimant count measure of unemployment rose 1,200, to 1,597,000. The rise was rather less than expected, but the five per cent claimant count rate remains the highest since August 1997.

• The number of people under 25 who are unemployed rose again, to 1,043,000.

Total employment rose, however, and David Cameron was keen to highlight this at prime minister’s questions:

“I think it’s noteworthy that, while the increase in unemployment is hugely unwelcome, there is still an increase in the number employed – another 18,000 in work.”

But the government should not take a great deal of comfort from this figure. The number of employees actually fell, but the overall employment figure rose because of a massive increase in self-employment:

Change in numbers in different categories of employment: Jun-Aug to Sep-Nov
Category of employment	Change in level
Employees	- 109,000
Self-employed	+ 101,000
Unpaid family workers	+ 14,000
Govt supported schemes	+ 12,000

This is the fourth month running when the number of employees has fallen and the number self-employed has risen.

A very interesting report today from John Philpott at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development looked at the Rise In Self-employment since the start of the recession.

CIPD provides very good reasons for believing that we haven’t had an increase in entrepreneurship, but a growing number of “odd jobbers”, willing to try their hand at anything to avoid being unemployed. This may be better than an increase in unemployment, if that’s the alternative, but it’s a sign of a weak labour market, not a strong one.

Another troubling feature of the employment figures is that the increase is the net result of a 75,000 increase in the numbers working part-time and a 57,000 fall in the numbers working full-time.

Altogether, the number of employees working full-time fell by 140,000. Inevitably, involuntary atypical employment continued to increase, with a 10,000 rise in the number of temporary employees who could not find permanent jobs and a 44,000 rise in the number of part-time workers who could not find full-time work:

The increase in the numbers on government schemes is positive – I’ve complained here before about the low level of participation when unemployment is high and rising – but the 14 per cent increase in unpaid family workers certainly isn’t. Unpaid work is troubling and an increase can be a sign of a weak labour market.

A final point worth noting is that the increase was entirely due to a 64,000 increase in the number of people over state pension age who are in employment – there’s nothing wrong with this, but we should worry that the number of working age people in employment fell by 46,000.

And there are other signs of a weak labour market in today’s figures. On the quarter, the number of redundancies increased by nearly ten per cent, continuing what now looks like a trend, not a blip:

There are now 5.8 unemployed people for each job vacancy, up from 5.6 in the last quarter. Again, this looks like a trend, not a blip:

On top of these figures, we have

• The Federation of Small Businesses reporting yesterday that a net balance of 6.5 per cent of SMEs plan to cut the numbers they employ in the first quarter of 2012,

• The British Chambers of Commerce opining that businesses “do not seem optimistic about future recruitment”,

• The ITEM Club revising down their GDP and employment forecasts, and

• The Centre for Economics and Business Research concluding that the UK is already in recession and that unemployment will rise to three million within 18 months.

The Prime Minister is wrong: the labour market is very weak and the prospects for unemployed people are very poor.

See also:

• Unemployment: How Cameron and Clegg are letting the next generation down – Stephen Timms MP and Rachel Reeves MP, December 14th 2011

• Unemployment: Plan A isn’t working – Richard Exell, December 14th 2011

• Unemployment hits 17-year high – record number of young people out of work – Shamik Das, October 12th 2011

• Without a Plan B, the record unemployment figures look set to get worse – Richard Exell, September 14th 2011

• Youth unemployment is still a cause for concern – Richard Exell, July 22nd 2011

Darren Johnson AM represents the Green Party in the London Assembly

I completely support the Mayor of London’s ambition to see more businesses taking on apprentices. They can help get young people into jobs and create a more skilled workforce. As the mayor has said, they are “key to the future prosperity of the capital”.

But his apprenticeship programme isn’t necessarily delivering on these aims.

A key plank of the mayor’s argument has been that it helps young people. He has talked about “fighting youth unemployment” with his apprenticeship scheme. In 2010 he warned that “young Londoners are in danger of losing out as the economy recovers unless more apprenticeship opportunities are provided for them”.

But I have uncovered that many of the apprentices in the organisations that the mayor is actually in charge of aren’t that young at all.

The mayor is responsible for the Greater London Authority, Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police Service, the London Fire Brigade and the soon-to-be-defunct London Development Agency.

In 2009/10, the first year of his programme, 60 per cent of the apprentices in these organisations were over the age of 25, and last year 48 per cent were over 25. Youth unemployment is measured for people aged 16 to 24 years old.

When I asked the mayor about this he blamed government funding and promised “an appropriate mix of apprenticeships” in the future. I intend to ask him what mix is appropriate if the aim really is to tackle youth unemployment.

The mayor’s other aim is to improve skills and tackle the low status of vocational education. The “future prosperity” of the capital and the country depends on more people being helped into more skilled jobs, and getting better at them through continued learning opportunities. So how do the mayor’s apprenticeships measure up?

One key component is off-the-job learning, and the government issued guidance last year recommending that apprentices get at least 100 hours per year.

The IPPR published a detailed study rethinking apprenticeships last year which concluded that this should be at least 200 hours. It also pointed out that in sectors where apprenticeships are well regarded it is often much higher. For example, apprentice engineers typically spend around 500 hours a year learning off the job.

I obtained information (here and here) revealing a mixed picture in the mayor’s backyard over the past two years, before the government issued its guidance.

Young apprentices in the London Fire Brigade got 56 hours off-the-job learning, while adult apprentices got none. Apprentices in the police service got between one and five half day workshops.

Young apprentices in the Greater London Authority appeared to fare better with 124 hours of “off the job GLA training, off the job outsource training and group network events”.

Lucky transport apprentices got an average of over 600 hours a year.

The IPPR also recommended that more apprenticeships should be offered for higher skilled positions.

Over half of all engineering apprenticeships are offered for advanced and higher level positions, which are key to our future prosperity, but this drops to 13 per cent for the hospitality industry. The IPPR suggest that the intermediate level should be renamed to something like Scotland’s “skill seeker” or Australia’s “traineeship”, and that we need a renewed focus further up the skill chain.

I asked the mayor about this as well.

All of the apprentices in the Greater London Authority and the London Development Agency were at the intermediate level. But completely against the national trend, 87 per cent of fire brigade apprentices, 83 per cent of police service apprentices and 77 per cent of transport apprentices were in advanced or higher level positions.

Nationally, 32 per cent of apprentices were advanced or higher level (source). The government has responded by allocating £25m to support up to 10,000 advanced and higher level apprenticeships.

But should the state keep subsidising this, or should we switch to a model like Germany – well known for its skilled workforce – where employers are required to do this as a matter of course?

If apprenticeships are key to our future prosperity, should the mayor not find the money for quality apprenticeships in his own budgets just as he would find the money for any other essential workforce requirements?

The government needs to overhaul and regulate the apprenticeship system if it is to be a genuine answer to youth unemployment and the skills gaps. The mayor can start with his own apprentices.

See also:

• Osborne’s refusal to increase demand leaves young unemployed without hope - Tony Dolphin, November 14th 2011

• Boris can take the lead on entry-level jobs for the young unemployed - Darren Johnson AM, July 14th 2011

• Making apprenticeships work for the economy - Catherine McKinnell MP, February 7th 2011

• Gove is the roadblock to Burnham’s calls of aspiration, aspiration, aspiration - Alex Hern, September 29th 2011

• Devolved nations call for Osborne to boost growth - Ed Jacobs, November 29th 2011

Rachel Fairley is the lead author of the Design Industry Voices report and MD of Fairley & Associates

A sense of gloom hangs over small business owners as they make their turkey sandwiches this week.

With the euro crisis dragging on, the Chancellor’s latest credit easing initiatives still to be felt, and official unemployment figures at 2.64 million, the highest since 1994, many will be reaching for another glass of sherry just to drown out the recent memory of their struggles in 2011 and the forecasts they’ve read for 2012.

Economists at global banking giant Standard Chartered say the UK economy is likely to be in recession going into 2012, eventually recovering in the second half of the year.

It feels like the tough times for small businesses have already lasted years, but with public sector clients experiencing cuts that will accelerate from next April, and Standard Chartered forecasting 1.5 per cent growth in 2013, the belt tightening is here to stay.

Many are simply adapting to the new economic reality. I’ve been surveying people working in digital and design agencies about the economic outlook for three years now, and it is striking the way that the longest UK recession in history has changed the culture of an industry based on pitching for business, piece meal contracts and unpaid interns.

Agency leaders are facing a second year of talent exodus. In the next twelve months 58 per cent of respondents are intending to change employer. Churn has far reaching consequences that SMEs can ill afford in this uncertain economy. It impacts on reputation, profitability, quality of work, client and talent retention and acquisition.

Recruiter Karina Beasley of Gabriele Skelton says:

“High staff turn-over means extra costs. Finding and recruiting new staff, then inducting them and getting them up to speed to take over accounts all adds to costs and eats into margins.

“In the current jobs market, agencies that advertise are being swamped with applications meaning that short-listing takes far longer than it used to, and candidates rarely get feedback and often do not even have their applications acknowledged.“

Too many are relying on freelancers and unpaid interns. Over half (58 per cent) of respondents told us their agency is employing less permanent staff, 43 per cent that they are using more unpaid interns and 55 per cent that they are using more freelancers. Is it any wonder that 32 per cent say that the quality of work has declined?

Stef Brown, MD of On Pointe Marketing, says:

“Clients are increasingly nervous that the ‘A’ team pitched, but an unstable ‘B’ team are delivering. And feeling like you aren’t on the ‘A’ team is demotivating, giving employees another reason to consider leaving.

“Not only this, but producing creative work for free during pitches means agencies are giving away their most valuable commodity: their intellectual property. I can’t think of any other professional services business where this is tolerated, or even considered an option.”

Not only do respondents say clients are expecting more work in pitches for free (71 per cent) but that once you’ve won the account more work for less money (85 per cent).

One agency owner told us:

“Yes, budgets are killing us, everyone wants something for nothing and without good reason and if you don’t agree they all go elsewhere.”

One designer said there is:

“Too much competition. Little opportunity.”

The movement of people between agencies can make or break reputation through word of mouth. This is increasingly true as a growing number of respondents are using the social web to talk about their professional experiences (30.4 per cent in 2011, up from 19 per cent in 2009).

Clients asking for safer work (54 per cent of respondents) will do nothing to enhance an agency’s (or the client’s own) reputation as being at the forefront of innovation. Safer solutions may not achieve the client’s business objectives.

One design director pointed out:

“It’s increasingly being dumbed down and made more obvious and commercial as the clients are frightened to try anything new. They tend to patronize the audience and don’t assume that the consumer can pick up on edgy subtleties.”

The good news is agency leaders are still wearing their rose-tinted glasses, perceiving their company’s performance higher than their employees. This may be helpful if they are to successfully lead their agency through the economic downturn and back to prosperity, but they should be aware that their employees do not share their point of view.

Staff perceive agency performance is getting worse: there is too much poor leadership, that doesn’t value ideas and opinions, and fails to reward people for going the extra mile when there are excessively high workloads relative to staffing levels.

Agencies appear to be running on empty, with staff engagement at an all-time low. Lets hope that the entrepreneurial spirit possessed by so many small business leaders can be reinvigorated at the heart of the agency, so that we may yet find a way to stop the exodus and find a path to growth.

See also:

• Manufacturers still fear a double-dip recession in 2012 – Tony Burke, December 23rd 2011

• More grim news: Economists predict UK will be back in recession in 2012 – Alex Hern, December 12th 2011

• OBR confirm Osborne will borrow more than the Darling projection – Daniel Elton, November 29th 2011

• Ignore Osborne’s spin; a jobs recession is inevitable – Tony Dolphin, November 1st 2011

• Hopes of an export and manufacturing-led recovery recede – Tony Dolphin, August 9th 2011

Originality and surprise are, supposedly, what the media are always interested in, but we’ve known for a month what the headlines from yesterday’s employment figures would be.

As was expected, the number of young unemployed people passed the million mark, reaching 1,016,000 – as Rory Weal has pointed out, this surpasses the level of the 1990s recession by some way. Almost as dreadful, the number of under-25s unemployed for over 12 months reached 259,000 – the highest figure since January 1993.

This is a good moment to juxtapose these results with what is happening to the numbers on government employment and training schemes. This figure has been falling since the spring – this was not so much of a worry in the first half of the year, but it has been more of a concern since unemployment started rising again and seems particularly shocking now:

Of course, these programmes aren’t just for young unemployed people, but the last government’s extra investment in employment programmes was heavily weighted towards youth unemployment – most of the extra places from late summer 2009 were for young people. Now is a good time to remember that, within a month of forming a new government, the coalition cut:

“£320 million from ending ineffective elements of employment programmes, including ending further rollout of temporary jobs through the young person’s guarantee (the ‘future jobs fund’) and removing recruitment subsidies from the ‘six-month offer’.”

The other message that the employment figures illuminate is that, as far as the labour market is concerned, this country might as well be back in recession. Sometimes the simplest charts are the most telling, and this is one of those occasions:

Employment was 197,000 lower in July to September than it had been in April to June, the biggest quarter on quarter fall since July 2009; this was the second month running when the quarter-on-quarter fall was over 100,000, the first time this has happened since July 2009.

Unemployment was 129,000 higher on the quarter, the biggest increase since July 2009; this was the second month running when the quarter-on-quarter increase was more than 100,000, the first time this has happened since (you guessed it) July 2009.

The claimant count rose by 5,300, to 1,598,400, the highest level since January 2010. In July – September, there were 5.7 unemployed people for every job vacancy, up from 5.4 in April – June; the latest figure is the highest since October 2009.

A final recession look-alike is in the earnings figures.

For the third month in succession, average weekly earnings (total pay) was exactly the same figure (£463); the average annual increase fell from 2.7 to 2.3 per cent (3 month average).

This figure was higher than it would have been because of large increases in bonuses, up 20.0 per cent overall and 21.7 per cent in the service sector. If we strip out bonuses, the figures for regular pay are ghastly, with the average annual increase just 1.7 per cent.

We can argue about whether a double-dip recession is in the offing, but as far as the world of work is concerned, it has already happened.

See also:

• High inflation + high unemployment = misery, misery, misery… – Tony Dolphin, November 16th 2011

• Unemployment is no better for the Scottish government than for the British one – Matthew Pitt, November 16th 2011

• Million young unemployed figure highlights enormity of the situation hitting our youth – Rory Weal, November 16th 2011

• Inflation is worse for the worst off – Alex Hern, November 6th 2011

• Misery on the rise, while demand for jobs is falling – Richard Exell, June 8th 2011

What do Boris Johnson, Kevin Pietersen, and James Caan have in common? They are all British citizens working and paying taxes in the UK who were born abroad. Precisely the problem group that Fraser Nelson is targetting in his latest pernicious and inaccurate analysis of Britain’s labour market.

The Coffee House blog today trails an interview with Iain Duncan Smith with the shock finding that “154 per cent of the employment increase can be accounted for by foreign-born workers”. But Fraser Nelson is using two tricks to inflate his figure which he’s been caught using before.

First, he has excluded pensioners returning to work. He claims that the ONS’ figures are “distorted” by the inclusion of OAPs without giving any justification for this claim. Surely in an ageing society where Government is extending the retirement age, it seems completely reasonable to include over-65s. Perhaps the exclusion took place to help massage the numbers. Including pensioners, the percentage of jobs taken by non-UK born workers falls from 154 per cent to 120 per cent.

But second, Nelson’s statistics only look at foreign-born workers. The list above, which includes his friend and predecessor, Boris Johnson, were all foreign-born yet hold British passports. When we look at nationality rather than country of birth (and include pensioners), the figures change dramatically and the percentage of jobs taken by non-Brits falls to 69 per cent. Indeed, using this more accurate measure, the number of British workers in employment has actually increased by 71,000 over the last year.

Readers may still be concerned that over two-thirds of the employment increases over the last year have gone to workers without British citizenship. But it’s worth considering two further points. First, a foreigner getting a new job does not necessarily take a job away from a domestic worker. This is called the ‘lump of labour fallacy‘ and has been widely debunked. Second, the steps needed to reduce the number even further are pretty tricky given that, of the 166,000 employment increase from non-British workers, 140,000 come from the European Union. Any attempt to restrict their free movement of labour would mean that British citizens would be unable to work in Paris, Madrid or Rome.

The irony is that we’ve been before, when the Spectator originally carried out this exercise in April 2010 looking at Labour’s record, Left Foot Forward issued a response pointing out these self-same flaws in Nelson’s methodology. In a grovelling update to a separate post, Nelson wrote:

“A rival version of this study has been posted by two TUC officials, looking at nationality rather than country of birth. This sharply reduces the percentage – because many immigrants hold UK passports. A perfectly valid exercise by the TUC, buy [sic] immigrants have British passports too.

“Then there’s the Boris factor. He was born in New York. So my study would include little Boris’s. No definition of “immigrant” is perfect. But foreign-born is the best you’ll get, which is why it is used by Eurostat. The number of foreign-born has doubled in Britain – something tells me  that’s not due to a rush of mothers flying off to Dublin hospitals and coming back with the baby as hand luggage.

“Finally, my original post had both working-age (99 percent of new jobs to foreign-born) and another version of all ages over 16 (including pensioners). This reduces it to 72 percent as there have been fewer pension-age immigrants.”

Far from updating his methodology, Nelson has repeated his previous error – disappointingly massaging new stats to fit an old and discredited argument.

NB: All the relevant data I’ve used is available in Table 8 of today’s ONS release.

Ed Miliband’s response to the Budget focused heavily on the OBR’s downgrading of the growth figures from 2.6% last June to 1.7% in the Budget. But Osborne failed to mention a further piece of bad news: the OBR anticipates an additional 130,000 people will be unemployed in 2012.

Table C2 of the June Budget estimated that the claimant count would be 1.5 million in 2011, 1.4 million in 2012, and 1.3 million in 2013. The revised figures in Table C1 of today’s Budget – reproduced below – estimate that the claimant count will be up 40,000 in 2011, up 130,000 in 2012, and up 130,000 in 2013.

Meanwhile, the ILO measure of unemployment jumps 0.2% in 2011, 0.5% in 2012, and 0.6% in 2013.

So much for a Budget for jobs and growth.

Today’s figures show that while the recession technically ended over a year ago the period November-January 2011 saw unemployment hit its highest level since October 1994 – 2,529,000 people.

Eight per cent of working age adults in the UK now report that they are unemployed, with practically the same number again reporting that while they are economically inactive they would like a job – 2,359,000 people. The number of vacancies showed a small fall (5,000) on the month, with only 496,000 vacancies across the economy in the three months to February 2011.

What’s more, this total still includes temporary census jobs; excluding census posts there were 467,000 jobs available. There are still five unemployed people chasing every job, and in some parts of the country – as our analysis of claimant unemployment data and Jobcentre notified vacancies has shown – the picture is far worse.

Public sector employment has fallen 132,000 on the year. Given that the bulk of the chancellor’s spending cuts won’t kick in until April 2011 this raises questions about the accuracy of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts - more than a third of the total drop in public sector employment (330,000) they forecast over the next four years appears to already have taken place.

On the question of whether the private sector can close the jobs gap the jury is still out. Private sector employment is up annually – by a positive-looking 428,000 – leading to an increase in overall employment of 296,000 on the year. But the sorts of jobs that have been created do not suggest a strong labour market recovery:

• 114,000 (39 per cent) are self-employed jobs;

• 12,000 (4 per cent) are unpaid family workers;

• 11,000 (4 per cent) are positions on Government supporting employment programmes;

• 206,000 are part-time (70 per cent); and

• Only 65,000 are full-time employee positions (22 per cent).

Today the Department for Work and Pensions chose to emphasise the positives – a quarterly 111,000 rise in full-time employee jobs resulting from large monthly rises between October-November (68,000) and November-December (57,000). But overall employment increased by far less, showing a smaller 32,000 rise on the month.

The difference is a result of quarterly falls in part-time employee jobs (-43,000) and in people undertaking full-time self-employment (-34,000). The scale and speed of the private sector jobs recovery remains extremely uncertain and with the private sector set to experience further job losses as the cuts start to bite in April there is no guarantee strong employee jobs growth will continue.

Economic inactivity levels are starting to show large increases – 31,000 on the quarter for women and 12,000 for men. However, these top line figures hide wider trends:

• A 35,000 increase in the number of women saying they are looking after a home or family;

• A 22,000 increase in the number of men who report they are long-term sick; and

• A 30,000 increase in the number of working age women who report they are retired.

Rises in female economic inactivity over 2010 mean that levels are now the highest they have been since 1996.

Youth unemployment is high and rising. Among 18-24 year olds unemployment rose 23,000 on the quarter and 5,000 on the month between November and December. Both young men and young women saw rising unemployment rates and levels – although on the month young women saw a 9,000 rise compared to a 4,000 fall for young men - with the male rate now 19.9 per cent compared to 16.4 per cent for young women. Both rates are unacceptably high – and for women are the highest recorded (since 1992); young men last saw rates this high in late 2009 and in the early 1990s.

The fall in the claimant count is welcome – although not everyone leaving benefits will be moving into work, some will simply have reached the end of their entitlement (should they only qualify for six months of contributory JSA) – and takes levels of claimant unemployment to their lowest since early 2009. But levels remain close to double those we saw before the recession, and with large amounts of Jobcentre support about to be cut, and the strength of the economic recovery extremely uncertain, it is too early to tell whether future months will see further falls.

It’s fair to say that today’s figures presented a mixed picture; but there is far more cause for concern than celebration. Next week’s Budget is a chance for the chancellor to produce a strategy to secure the recovery and invest in jobs and growth.

Our fear is that without a re-assessment of the scale and speed of his spending cuts high unemployment could become a permenant feature of the UK’s economy.

Today’s employment figures are very bad. Covering the last three months of 2010, nearly every indicator is worse when compared with the data for June to August. Employment is down 68,000, unemployment is up 44,000 and the number of people on Jobseeker’s Allowance is up 2,400. The employment rate is down 0.3 percentage points and the unemployment rate is up 0.1 points.

Long-term unemployment is up too, with the number unemployed over a year up 17,000 to 833,000 and the number unemployed over two years is up eleven thousand to 339,000.

The figures confirm the disastrous state of the labour market for young people.

Unemployment actually came down for people aged 25-49 (by 13,000) and over 50 (by 9,000) but rose (by 24,000) for 16 and 17 year olds and those aged 18-24 (by 42,000). Total youth unemployment is now 965,000, the highest recorded since records began in 1992.

The number of people in involuntary atypical work grew again, as it has since the start of the recession. There was a 4,000 fall in the number of people in part-time jobs because they couldn’t find a full-time alternative, but a 27,000 increase in the number in involuntary temporary work.

There are 1,771,000 people in involuntary part-time and temporary work, the highest total since records began in 1992:

At first sight, there’s some good news in the vacancy figures, which show an increase of 40,000. But, for the second month running. this figure is distorted by the temporary vacancies for Census enumerators.

The Office for National Statistics press release includes a note about this, and points out that without these jobs the increase would be a much less impressive 8,000 from the three months to October

Chris Grayling’s response to this unusually poor set of results was weird:

“…things do now seem to be stabilising. The rise in the number of vacancies is particularly encouraging.”

Last month, he hailed the increase in vacancies even though, without the census jobs, the number actually fell. This month they have gone up, though I’d hardly describe the increase as “particularly encouraging”.

The government is particularly vulnerable on unemployment at the moment. Last night, Laura Kuenssberg reported that officials expect the number of unemployed people who participate in the Work Programme to be substantially lower the numbers who took part in the existing welfare-to-work programmes.

She reported that about 850,000 people took part in the old schemes in 2009-10, but that 605,000 would take part in 2011-12 and 565,000 in 2012-13. (The 850,000 figure must refer to every single programme, including the Future Jobs Fund and other Young Person’s Guarantee and Six Month Offer schemes, Employment Zones, Pathways to Work and the various New Deal programmes.)

“A Whitehall source” countered with two points that are likely to be the essence of the Government’s defence: one is that the difference is because of a “big jump” in the numbers being referred. This is pretty weak – certainly there was a big jump between 2008/9 and 2009/10, but there’s no sign of the “big fall” that would be necessary to explain the discrepancy:

Claimant count unemployment, 16+, UK, not seasonally adjusted

In fact, most people expect unemployment to rise this year, making this explanation even harder to accept. The anonymous source had a second defence – that:

“…there would be more intensive help for people at Job Centres even if they were not on the work programme.”

The same argument is being offered up to fend off criticism of the decision to close down two programmes for disabled people – Pathways to Work and the New Deal for disabled people – before the Work Programme is in place to take them on. This problem was inevitable, given the government’s decision to end the existing programmes in the spring, when the contracts run out, but not start the Work Programme till June.

In the case of non-disabled unemployed people, providers’ contracts are being extended to cover the gap, but there doesn’t seem to be the money to do this for disabled people. The unfortunate claimants caught in the middle will be handed back to their local Job Centres for whatever support they can offer.

Which won’t be much: Jobcentre Plus faces 25 per cent cuts (even the Telegraph calls them “sweeping”), with 9,300 jobs lost by 2013.

Already PCS members are reporting that backlogs of claims are hitting JCP performance, so it seems unlikely that disabled people – or anyone else – will be getting “more intensive help”. If today’s figures mark the start of a widely predicted increase in unemployment, more and more people could find themselves getting less and less help.

In-work poverty is now a bigger challenge than out-of-work poverty, new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds today.

Its latest annual report analysing poverty and social exclusion shows that 58% of children living in relative poverty have at least one parent in work. This reflects a long-term trend: in-work poverty has been steadily rising for several decades to affect over 2 million children today, while out-of-work poverty has been falling steadily since the early 1990s so it affects fewer than 1.5 million children today.

Part of this trend appears to be driven by people swapping out-of-work poverty for in-work poverty. In particular, the lone parent employment rate has risen by more than 10 percentage points over the last 15 years. But much of this increase has been in low paid work that does not often offer much chance of progression.

All of this points to the fact that, while work remains the best route out of poverty, it is not enough on its own. A strategy to cut (relative) poverty in general, and child poverty in particular, needs to focus on increasing in-work earnings as well as finding work.

Over the last decade, tax credits have “taken the strain”. The JRF report finds that tax credits are today keeping one million families out of poverty. In this context, the Coalition Government’s plans to cut tax credits (including reducing the Childcare Tax Credit to 70% of eligible costs from 80% today, cuts and caps to Housing Benefit (given HB is also an in-work benefit) are likely to lead to increases in relative poverty. At the same time, this group faces a double hit from declining real incomes, as the Resolution Foundation has shown.

But equally clear is that increasing tax credits more quickly than earnings is not possible each and every year and doesn’t provide a full policy response – there are limits to how far increasing wage subsidies can ‘hold back the tide’. So, while further increases in tax credits would be part of a strategy for cutting in-work poverty, they are not the whole of the answer.

Equally important are the integration of the skills and employment systems – still too disparate today – to help people ‘get on’ at work as well as ‘get in’ to work. Not to be forgotten too is the role of employers, both in creating opportunities and in paying a living wage. On the latter, the public sector can take a lead, both directly and through their supply chains. None of this is easy, particularly in the current economic climate, and employers need to see the business case for acting – this needs to be part of an economic growth strategy, rather than solely based on corporate social responsibility – supported by Government.