The claim
“Youth unemployment was falling at the General Election, and it’s risen on his (David Cameron’s) watch.”
Ed Miliband, Labour leader, Prime Minister’s Questions, 16 September 2011
The background
Mr Cameron made a bad slip with his figures at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, and gets the full FactCheck “Fiction” rating for one of his claims on the Government’s unemployment record.
He was accused of another factual error by Ed Miliband on the increasingly serious topic of joblessness among young people.
Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures show that most of the rise in unemployment reported this week is among 16-24-year-olds.
The total number of unemployed people increased by 80,000 three months to July 2011 to reach 2.51 million. And a whopping 78,000 of those unfortunate people were aged under 24.
It’s a sensitive topic for a Government that scrapped Education Maintenance Allowance for teenagers who wanted to stay in education, and axed Labour’s flagship back-to-work project, the Future Jobs Fund.
Mr Cameron responded by attacking Labour’s record, saying: “Youth unemployment went up by 40 per cent under the last Government – 278,000 more young people unemployed while he was sitting in the Treasury.”
The Labour leader shot back: “Not for the first time, he’s wrong at what he says at the despatch box. Youth unemployment was falling at the General Election and now it is rising.”
The analysis
The Prime Minister does have some ammunition when it comes to youth unemployment.
ONS stats show that when Tony Blair came to power in May 1997, there were 652,000 unemployed 16-24 year olds.
When the Coalition ousted Gordon Brown in May 2010, there were 930,000.
That’s an increase of 278,000, or 42 per cent.
But Ed Miliband is also technically right to say that these very high figures were on a downward curve as Labour left office.
Youth unemployment stood at 935,000 in the three months from March to May 2010 but fell in subsequent quarters – the first few months of the Coalition – to reach a low of 904,000 in the July-September figures, then climbed sharply again throughout the rest of of 2010.
It drifted down again in the first few months of 2011 before bouncing back up again to reach the recent high.
But it’s far from clear whether Mr Miliband is justified in using this fact to claim victory for Labour’s unemployment policies.
After all, unemployment figures, like all statistics, will naturally tend to drift up and down in the short term for any number of reasons, and it may have been pure coincidence that they fell slightly as Mr Brown was packing his bags.
Indeed, the numbers for youth joblessness have fallen as well as risen at various times under this Government – something Mr Miliband neglected to mention on Wednesday.
And we’ll never know if the downward trend would have continued if Labour had won the election.
Arguably, it’s only the long-term trends that tell us anything of real value.
What they show us in this case is that youth unemployment was high in the wake of the last recession in the early 1990s, remained low and stable during the rest of that decade and the early to mid-2000s, then began to rise sharply in summer 2007 in the run-up to the current economic downturn.
The importance of underlying economic conditions was stressed by the Institute of Fiscal Studies back in 2009, when Mr Cameron was in opposition and, ironically, castigating Labour for its own record on youth unemployment.
The IFS concluded that politics may well have had little to do with the problem, saying: “The rise in youth unemployment during this recession is no different from what happened during the previous two.
“However, the level of unemployment is highly affected by the state of the economy, and the unemployment rate for 18 – 24 year olds was no higher before the current recession than when Labour came to power.”
The shoe is on the other foot now, but Mr Cameron might live to regret throwing Labour’s post-downturn performance in Mr Miliband’s face if his own policies on youth unemployment prove to be equally fruitless while the economy flatlines.
The verdict
We’ll give the Labour leader a technical “Fact” rating for this one, but dwelling on short-term ups and downs don’t tell us much about the truth behind the statistics.
And Mr Cameron has a point when he says that Labour’s own record doesn’t give Mr Miliband anything to brag about where creating jobs for young people is concerned.
However, long-term trends indicate that joblessness may have more to do with the overall health of the economy than with the job creation policies of any party.
It’s not clear that the statistics being thrown around the House of Commons today helped either side’s cause, or furthered our understanding of the long-term causes of youth unemployment.
By Patrick Worrall
