The claim
“The level of youth unemployment actually went up by 40 per cent under the last government”
David Cameron MP, Prime Minister’s Questions, February 16, 2011
The background
Nearly a million 16-24 year olds are out of work – that’s well over a third of all the jobless people in Britain, and is a record high for youth unemployment.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that more than a fifth of young people between the ages of 16-24 are currently job hunting – or 965,000.
To clarify, this does not include students or those not looking for work – this is number of those willing and able to work.
Or as Martina Milburn, chief executive of youth charity The Princes Trust, put it: “There are now enough unemployed young people to fill every football stadium in the Premier League, with almost 200,000 left queuing outside.”
The analysis
Of course, the gloomy job stats were Ed Miliband’s first point of call in today’s PMQs.
David Cameron agreed that the state of Britain’s workforce “is a matter of great regret…particularly in terms of youth unemployment”.
But the PM refused to take the blame, and said it was the last government’s failed policies on welfare, education and Labour’s Back to Work programme that had failed.
All of this has pushed up youth unemployment by 40 per cent, he said. But is his arithmetic right?
The Conservative Party HQ told FactCheck that Mr Cameron based his 40 per cent claim on ONS figures.
When Tony Blair swept into Number 10 in May 1997, there were 664,000 unemployed 16-24 year olds, the Tories quoted.
And when Gordon Brown walked out in May 2010, there were 920,000. The Conservatives work this out as an increase of 38.6 per cent.
Our friends at the ONS confirmed these figures were right. And we calculated that the rate of unemployment therefore, rose from 14.5 per cent to 19.4 per cent among 16-24 year olds under Labour.
However, here at FactCheck we’re not scared of hulking great big ONS spreadsheets, so we asked for more figures.
Digging into the historical data, FactCheck found that unemployment figures under Labour were fairly static – and even dropped – until around 2007.
What’s more, the historical data splits Britain’s youth into two groups; 16-17 year olds and 18-24 year olds.
And what quickly becomes evident, is that the noticeable jump in the unemployment rate comes among the 16-17 year old group.
In this group of school leavers, the unemployment rate in May-July 1997 was 20.3 per cent.
It doesn’t rise significantly for 10 years – until the run-up to the credit crunch in May-June 2007, when it leapt to 28.2 per cent, or 208,000.
After a brief dip to 25.7 per cent in 2008, the rate again jumps to 34.5 per cent in 2009 and then 32.3 per cent in 2010.
Meanwhile, among the wider, older age bracket of 18-24 that the ONS measures – fares better.
In May-July 1997 this age group has an unemployment rate of 13.6 per cent, and it actually remains below that – hovering around the 12 per cent mark – until the same period in 2009, when it climbs to 17.4 per cent. A year later in 2010, and the rate is exactly the same amid this group – with 728,000 jobless.
The verdict
Mr Cameron was well-armed in today’s PMQs with a sturdy set of stats – the number of jobless youths climbed 38.6 per cent during Labour’s tenure – so he rounded it up to 40 per cent.
But look closer at the data and it becomes clear that overall, the rate of unemployed 16-24 year olds was fairly static throughout the last government. In 1997 the rate was 14.1 per cent, and that was only surpassed in 2007, with a rate of 14.4 per cent. The following two years in 2008 and 2009, it climbed to 15 per cent and 19 per cent respectively.
While technically Mr Cameron was right, it is extremely hard not to see the correlation between the rise in youth unemployment and the onset of the credit crisis. It’s a sticky point no economist would ignore, so why should the PM?
