§ Lord Kennetasked Her Majesty's Government:
What is their opinion of the calculation made by the Employment Institute and the Unemployment Unit that the costs of unemployment amount to some £24 billion per annum
The Earl of CaithnessAll such calculations are highly speculative. They depend on assumptions about the direct and indirect tax unemployed people would pay in employment. It is impossible to know what these would be in practice; the only certain thing is that they will vary widely. Such assumptions are inevitably arbitrary and any estimate of the costs of unemployment is therefore subject to a high degree of uncertainty.