The claim
“There are jobs out there, with Jobcentre Plus taking on 10,000 vacancies every working day.”
Spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), 14 November 2011
The background
The grim news that a “slow, painful contraction” is expected in the jobs market was met with defiance by the DWP.
“We always said that the road to recovery would be tough – there is a long way to go until before we deal with all the economic challenges ahead particularly given the crisis in the eurozone,” a spokesman said.
The problem is, said the department, the message isn’t getting through that despite the gloom, there are jobs out there. In fact, there are 10,000 new jobs advertised every day at the Jobcentre, they insisted.
Are they right – is there a silver lining amid the gloom? FactCheck investigates.
The analysis
The average number of Jobcentre Plus vacancies over the last year is about 325,000 a month – or 75,000 a week – which is where the DWP gets the 10,000 figure from. But let’s put that into context.
Fewer jobs
Jobcentre vacancies currently make up 70 per cent of all jobs on the market.
Overall, there were 462,000 jobs up for grabs between July and September. That is almost a third less than the 604,000 jobs going during the same period in 2008.
So there are far fewer jobs on the market – and in the last quarter the number of available jobs climbed just 0.2 per cent, according to latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.
But we’re not quite at the point we were during the financial crisis – when the freeze on hiring whittled down the number of available jobs to as few as 424,000 between May and July in 2009.
More job hunters
At the moment, there’s one vacant job for every 5.6 people looking – almost triple the number of people per job that there were ten years ago.
Between 2001 and 2008 the number of people searching versus the number of jobs available was largely stable – ranging between 2.2 and 2.9 people per job. The market was at its worst in January 2010, when there were 8.5 people for each vacancy (see graph below).
Sector-wide slowdown
An industry breakdown by the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of vacancies has flatlined across the board. The majority of industries have seen zero per cent growth in vacancies per 100 jobs in the past year – with the sole exception of the mining and quarrying industry which has seen a 1.3 per cent rise year on year.
Full time vs part time
According to the DWP, of all the Jobcentre jobs advertised in September this year, 88,251 were part time and the remaining 257,791 were full time positions. In the last year, just under 75 per cent of new vacancies have been for full-time jobs.
The verdict
The DWP is right to point out there are new jobs advertised every day, but as the graph shows the gloom is well founded. There are more people vying for fewer jobs in a market where jobs growth has flatlined.
At the height of the financial crisis in 2009, as a big freeze on hiring swept the country, there were eight unemployed people per vacancy. That’s four times the number of people per job than pre-crisis.
Until last November, that number was on a steady path south on the road to recovery.
But in November, the same month the Spending Review was announced, it stalled, and indeed went into reverse.
By Emma Thelwell
