Shrieks the BBC.
Yeah, yeah, sigh.
1. As at December 2008, there were 8,064,000 million people working in 'Education, health and public admin' ( from the ONS' Labour Market Statistics, Table 5(2) here).
2. As at March 1998 (the oldest version of these tables which I can track down), there were 6,365,000 million people working in 'Education, health and public admin' (from the ONS' Labour Market Statistics, Table 5 here).
3. So an alternative headline would be something along the lines of "Forecast suggests Lib-Con government to cut about one-third of the public sector jobs which Labour added in the last decade over the next five years. And it's not like we had a 'small state' a decade ago, is it?", although I admit it's not very punchy.
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4 comments:
Staff turnover is about 12.6% so 600,000 is less than the number of people who leave the public sector every year naturally.
Interesting that over the same period "Finance & Business Services" employment increased faster (+30.4% to 6481k employees) than "Education, health and public admin" (+26.7% to 8064k).
Given that Finance is likely to contract, where does the OBS think the private sector will expand by 2.5 million jobs net?
MIK, that's a very high turnover, does it include or exclude people moving from one public sector job to another?
RW, the finance sector and the public sector are as bad as each other. If they both slim down, then so much the better.
I did some work in the public sector about a year after Labour got into power (so before the major crank up), and yes, you're right. They could have managed that department with 2/3rds of the staff.
I also knew some contractors at the time who left public sector contracts because they just couldn't stand the boredom of how little they had to do.
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