FactCheck: five million not worked under Labour
Updated on 27 August 2009
The Tories claim five million people haven't worked since Labour came to power, but it's based on data from 2001. Do their figures still add up?
The claim
"The latest census data shows 2 million people in this country have never had a job. Almost 3 million people have not worked under this Labour Government."
Theresa May, shadow work and pensions secretary, 27 August 2009
The background
Unemployment is on the rise, with new figures yesterday showing the number of families where no one works has increased by nearly a quarter of a million over the past year.
But the Conservative party made headlines with another claim that five million people hadn't worked since Labour came to power. It was repeated in a speech this morning by shadow work and pensions secretary Theresa May, and made the front page of yesterday's Daily Express, under the headline 'Benefits scandal'.
But the Tories based their calculations on data from the 2001 census. Yep, that's right - 2001; eight years ago.
This showed that around two million people had never worked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these are young people - nearly a million were under 19. Can we still say, eight years on, that these people have never worked?
A further three million people of working age hadn't worked since before 1996. So we know they left the workforce under the previous Tory government, and, in 2001, hadn't come back under Labour.
But have things changed since?
The analysis
The Conservatives told us this was the freshest data they could get - and that, as unemployment was now higher than in 2001, they thought it would still bear up.
Experts we spoke to pointed to a more recent set of data - the Labour Force Survey. It is a respected source of official statistics, and, perhaps crucially, you don't have to wait a decade for new figures.
Professor Paul Gregg, senior research fellow in labour markets at the Centre for Economic Performance analysed recent LFS data for FactCheck. The population has increased since 2001, but this in fact did come up with a headline number broadly similar to that quoted by the Tories - a little under five million people of working age, haven't worked since Labour came to power.
Let's drill down into the numbers - who actually are these workless people?
There were three million (aged 16-74) who have never worked - about a million more than the Tories' data. Fifty per cent of these are aged 16-19, and another 20 per cent are aged 20-24.
Of these younger people, the vast majority - 79 per cent of the 16-19-year-olds and 74 per cent of the 20-24-year-olds - are currently students. Call them layabout tax-dodgers if you want, but it seems strange to get too worked up about people staying out of the job market because they're getting training or an education. Even with opportunities for graduates looking increasingly slim in the current economic climate, the majority of them won't stay workless for life.
Still, this leaves 900,000 people aged 25 and over who have never worked, and 450,000 younger non-students who have never worked - although it seems likely that many of this latter group would have been studying until recently. Other reasons include having children young, and disability.
There are also 2.9 million people aged 16-74 who have not worked since 1996, but report working previously.
Fifty-seven per cent of these - 1.6 million - are aged 65 or over, so would have been aged between 52 and 61 when Labour came to power, and didn't work again.
"A lot of these people would have left the labour market in the early nineties recession and never come back," said Gregg.
"However, employment among 50-64 has risen a lot - so this is not being repeated for new generation of over 50s."
This leaves 1.25 million people of working age who have not worked since 1996, almost all of whom fall into the 50-64 age group.
"Many of these are sick and disabled, or have effectively retired already, or never went back to work after bringing up their children," said Gregg.
"There are a lot of people on long-term sick benefits - that is an undeniable problem and it's not to say it doesn't need to be looked at, although it is something that started a long time before Labour came to power."
So, if we narrow our figures down to people of working age, and discount those who have yet to get cracking on their careers, we get up to around two-and-a-half million people who have never worked under Labour (depending on how many of the young non-students are included in the figures, and how many are assumed to be college leavers about to get into work).
The verdict
The basis for the Tories' initial claim - that eight-year-old census data showing five million people hadn't worked between 1996 and 2001, meant five million still hadn't worked under Labour to date - was decidedly dodgy.
However, analysis of more recent data does give a figure that's broadly similar - so though we're far from convinced by their methodology, the final claim that five million people haven't worked since Labour came to power does broadly stand up.
Still, closer examination of this figure gives a less alarming picture - many of the five million are still at college or university, for example.
FactCheck rating: 4.5
FactCheck has rated the claim 4.5 for the way in which it was calculated, but 2.5 for the actual accuracy.
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Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.
The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.
The sources
Conservatives - five million people have never worked under Labour
Centre for Economic Performance
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