By Mark Smulian
13 April 2011
Workforce experts have asked the government to carry out a comprehensive audit of public sector job cuts to try to settle arguments between forecasters.
John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, said this would help to explain ‘an apparent disconnect between Office for Budget Responsibility estimates and various independent estimates of the scale and phasing of reductions in public employment’.
He said the OBR had reduced its forecast for the total cuts in government jobs between 2010/11 and 2014/15 from 490,000 to 310,000, a level that was ‘unlikely to have a significant impact on the UK labour market overall’.
But Philpott said: ‘OBR forecasts contradict many independent estimates of the emerging scale of public sector job reductions published by the CIPD and other employers’ organisations, trades unions and professional bodies.’
He said these pointed not only to more job losses but also to more of them occurring in the next two years, rather than later in the Comprehensive Spending Review period.
A comprehensive audit, drawn from figures on workforce reductions across the public sector, would help to avoid the uncertainty generated by these disputed figures.
‘There is a wide confidence interval between the wilder upper-end of speculation on likely public sector job losses and the most optimistic end of the scale,’ Philpott said. ‘A comprehensive audit of this kind would help close this gap.’
Unemployment figures published today showed a fall in the number of jobless people. In the three months to the end of February, unemployment fell by 17,000 to 2.48 million or 7.8%.
