§ Lord Roberts of Conwyasked Her Majesty's Government:
What proportion of the 1.7 million new jobs created since 1997 were in (a) the public sector; and (b) the private sector. [HL374]
§ Lord McIntosh of HaringeyThe information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from the National Statistician, Mr Len Cook, to Lord Roberts of Conwy, dated December 2003.
As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question about jobs created in the UK since 1997. (HL374)
While statistics of jobs created are not available explicity, statistics of employment and jobs from surveys enable comparisons to be made of net changes between 1997 and 2003.
The latest statistics for total employment from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) show 28.2 million people in employment for the three months ending September 2003, compared with 26.5 million for the three months ending May 1997, a net increase of 1.7 million people in employment.
Analyses of jobs by public and private sector are made using administrative returns, which are not as up to date as the LFS data. The latest information from this source shows that, of the total increase in jobs between 1997 and 2002, 30 per cent were in the public sector and 70 per cent were in the private sector.