As Fact Check has noted, this is a claim the Prime Minister likes to repeat, even though it has been disproved a number of times; today’s figure simply updates similar data he quoted last year. This is surprising, because a closer look at the relevant statistics reveals a story that is less flattering to the government.

The Office for National Statistics publishes employment figures broken down by sector – the Public Sector Employment Statistics – quarterly, not monthly. The election took place in the middle of the second quarter of 2010, which ran from April to June. And it is true that in latest figures – for the final quarter of 2011 – private sector employment was 634,000 higher than it had been in the first quarter of 2010. Public sector employment was 381,000 lower.

But let’s look at the figures for each quarter and how they change:

That extra 314,000 private sector jobs in the second quarter of 2010 is important to the argument here. Without it, the government’s private sector job creation total falls to 320,000 – less than the 350,000 public sector jobs lost.

Fact Check have had a great deal of fun with a straight face, trying to work out how many of the 314,000 jobs were created in April and early May of 2010 and how many in late May and June. But of course, the government cannot plausibly claim responsibility for any of the increase that took place that quarter – if the change had been in the other direction we can be sure they’d have blamed it on Gordon Brown.

Why does the PM continue to draw our attention to figures that actually highlight one of his government’s failures? It’s a bit of a conundrum – any suggestions?

Each month, the Bank of England publishes a summary of the reports on business conditions from their agents in the regions and nations of the UK (more on the agents here). There are dozens of business and economic surveys these days, but this is one of just two or three that cannot be ignored because they tend to be proved right. (Or, as the Bank puts it, they often “have a high correlation with subsequently published ONS data”.)

As is often the case, today’s Agents’ Summary  is a bit of a mixed bag, but some of the measures I pay particular attention to look pretty dull. One is investment intentions (planned and possible spending over the next 12 months) which are important because investment is such a key influence on the economic cycle. Today’s report shows that the agents expect investment only to grow slowly, and it looks as though the improvement earlier in the year may have been cut off:

The summary characterises this as “further modest increases in capital spending over the coming year”, which sounds fair enough. Its yet another indication that we’re unlikely to see an investment-led recovery this year.

The other element I pay particular attention to is what the agents tell us about businesses and employment. The headline employment statistics have been looking good for six months, with employment rising and unemployment gradually coming down. But, as Duncan has pointed out, if the labour market was really tightening you’d expect to see real wages rising, when in fact they’ve been headed in the opposite direction. You’d also expect to see more employers having difficulty recruiting the right staff, but there’s no sign of that:

The run of better employment results may be short lived in any case, going by the survey’s results for employment intentions:

As the summary puts it, private sector employment looks likely to be “broadly unchanged over the next six months.” Given that the OBR expects public sector employment to fall 110,000 between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 it would be brave to forecast anything other than a return to rising unemployment.

The Agents’ reports may err on the optimistic side. Today’s Industrial Trends survey from the CBI reports that manufacturers’  total order books are down with firms “anticipating that production will be broadly unchanged over the coming three months (a balance of -3%)” – which would represent a slowing down from recent results. The Markit Purchasing Managers’ Index for manufacturing results at the start of the month also showed manufacturing growth slowing down; (but the Index was still positive, and it is worth noting that the Services PMI results showed “solid growth“.)

We are expecting a large number of people who receive less housing benefit to be able to negotiate their rents downwards.

I’ve always been sceptical about this claim and the latest mortgage and landlord possession statistics from the Ministry of Justice suggest that this is a really bad time to rely on tenants’ ability to persuade landlords to cut their rents.

Mortgage posession actions came down after a peak in 2008 and have not risen again – the MoJ argues that “lower interest rates, a proactive approach from lenders in managing consumers in financial difficulties, and various interventions, such as introduction of the Mortgage Pre-Action Protocol” made a difference.

But landlord posession actions have been rising since early 2010:

We shouldn’t over-interpret these figures, but you’ve got to say that there’s no sign of landlords being reluctant to repossess when they think they need to. It does not look like a good time to rely on tenants’ strength to avert a catastrophe of social cleansing.

He feeds over 54,000 families every day worldwide.

I don’t think the writer (someone who “had the pleasure to work with Rupert Murdoch during my career in Australia and London”) means that Rupe’s the Father Christmas of soup runs, zooming from one time zone to another to reach the needy. Plainly he’s referring to the News International workforce – and my first thought was that it would be more accurate to say that every day 54,000 families worldwide feed him.

But it did strike me as giving an insight into a conservative problem that people are finding hard to explain. Over at the New York Review of Books Blog there’s a really interesting article by Elizabeth Drew about the Presidential election. One of the puzzles she highlights is why the Republicans have chosen such an unattractive candidate, and “what it is that causes him to stumble and say oafish things.”

She lists some of the things he’s said that can’t be doing him any electoral good, such as his throw-away line that his wife has “a couple of Cadillacs” or that the way to cope with a tough jobs market is to borrow some money from your parents. And the things he’s done are even worse:

… going for the presidency he didn’t bother to pull out funds he’d stashed away in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland or hold off in expanding their home in La Jolla in a $12 million renovation, including an elevator for the four-car garage. The symbolism of such things goes well beyond the “tin ear,” and suggests a paralyzing inability to understand the circumstances of most others: What else can explain Romney’s look of disgust as he disdained the cookies the hostess had placed before him when he met with a middle class group around a picnic table in Bethel, Pennsylvania?

But the tin ear isn’t a good explanation. Ms Drew herself points out that FDR and JFK were wealthy too and didn’t suffer from this alienating distance from ordinary people. In the end, she offers an intelligent connection to modern politics: Romney had to win the nomination from a party that has moved so far to the right “that any suggestion that he cares for the plight of others could have endangered his prospects”.

That rings truer, but Ronald Reagan was able to advocate right-wing positions without suggesting that he came from a different planet.

There’s a hint about what has changed since the 198os in the quotation I began with. There is a notion – common in the USA and becoming more common in Britain – that rich people are the source of all progress and the rest of us are in their debt. In this narrative, less fortunate people - especially if they expect social benefits – are “parasites” (to use Ayn Rand‘s terminology.)

I might have found it more difficult to argue with a claim that 54,000 people’s jobs were partly created by Murdoch’s entrepreneurship. The notion that he feeds them and their families is ludicrous – but not if you move in circles where the Randian worship of Business Man is taken for granted.

Romney says these things because nothing in his life so far has made him stop to wonder if they might not be true. America is creating a nobility with no sense of nobless oblige; but how far behind are we?

In a recent opinion poll, 74% of British people agreed that “the government pays out too much in benefits; welfare levels overall should be reduced.” And yet as recently as 1996, 52% said that benefit levels were “too low and cause hardship.”

What has happened? The last government’s emphasis on the commitment to fighting fraud and not tolerating work avoiders may or may not have worked at neutralising welfare as a reason why people didn’t vote Labour, but it certainly didn’t help maintain support for benefits. The British Social Attitudes Survey has been asking people whether they think benefits are too low or too high for nearly thirty years and there’s a real difference between the results before and after 1997:

Of course, the stance of the last government isn’t the only relevant factor, there’s also been an astonishingly vituperative press. We’ve had that before (I’m old enough to remember headlines in the Sun about ‘scroungers’ in the 1970s) but what is new is the TV joining in. Many people assume that broadcast media are less biased and more likely to be truthful than the newspapers so the 30 minutes hates directed at unemployed and disabled people are bound to have taken their toll. Just today, we learn from the MS Society that 24% of non-disabled people think disabled people “often exaggerate the extent of their physical limitations” and last year Scope reported that two-thirds of disabled people said they had experienced aggression, hostility and name-calling, with 47% saying this had got worse over the previous 12 months.

How can we turn this round? The ‘othering’ of people on benefits would not have developed such momentum if it hadn’t reflected the reality of the changing welfare state. Over the last 30 years, the benefits system has become more and more means-tested, with the result that there is very little in common between the people who receive benefits and the people who pay for them.

When people think about the taxes they pay that fund the welfare state and the people who rely on it their thoughts will develop on very different lines according to whether they think of this transfer as simply money out of their pocket or as an insurance policy they may need to use themselves one day. A generation of reforms has chipped away at the notion that social security is there for everyone – thirty years ago, most workers paid 6½% of their earnings in Contributions. In return, they qualified for benefits that could include an earnings-related supplement and extra payments for dependent children and adults, as well as access to a system of reduced benefits for workers with an incomplete Contributions record.

All these enhancements have now gone and the rules on who qualifies for NI benefits have got tougher and tougher. During the recession, many people who needed benefits for the first time found that they did not qualify or that the benefits were shockingly low. Workers who had thought their NI Contributions (now nearly double, at 12 per cent) were paying for an insurance policy they might use one day were utterly disillusioned.

As Kate and Declan argue, the claims that we have a “something for nothing” welfare state are precisely wrong – part of the reason for the crisis in support for social security is the rise of the “nothing for something” system. A strategy for reviving support for decent benefits must tackle this. Workers will support a generous welfare state – but part of the deal must be a promise of security for all.

This morning I mentioned the need for the economy to grow at about 0.8 per cent a year to keep up with population growth, otherwise per capita GDP will fall. The other issue is that we’re used to a certain rate of growth to pay for a gradually rising standard of living and to maintain employment. In the twenty years before the recession growth averaged slightly over half a per cent per quarter – even if we always avoided negative growth, sustained growth below this level will feel pretty cruddy. This afternoon’s chart tries to measure these gaps: imagine that the economy had continued to grow at 0.2 per cent a quarter, enough to maintain per capita GDP; the blue line measures how far short of that we’ve actually been. Imagine that the economy had grown at 0.5 per cent per quarter, the red dotted line measures how far short of that we’ve actually been.

The lower the line the worse our position. There’s nothing particularly original about this, its simply an attempt to show that just avoiding recession isn’t OK. There’s a strong chance next month’s revisions of the GDP figures will show that actually we managed to avoid a double-dip recession. If that happens, the usual suspects in the media will trumpet this as tremendous news for the government and a blow to all their critics.

It won’t be. Low growth may not be as bad as a reduction in GDP but it is still bad news. 

“Normal” growth for our economy is about 2 – 2.5 per cent a year and coming out of a recession we should be looking for about one percentage point more than that. As Duncan has pointed out, we need economic growth of about 0.2 per cent a quarter just to keep up with population growth: the last year and a half on this chart looks like stagnation but it feels like decline.

Even so, it’s very hard to get enthusiastic about this; indeed, when you look a bit deeper, there’s some very worrying trends. The big factor was summed up in Duncan’s labour market in one chart yesterday: the overall improvement is masking a longer-term stagnation in full-time employment. In other words, we’re paying for a slow improvement in unemployment with high levels of underemployment – it isn’t just part-time employment that’s been rising, it’s also the number of people who say that they’re working part-time because they couldn’t get a full-time job:

 In fact, it’s a broader problem than this, there is also the matter of involuntary temporary employment – there are 627,000 temporary workers who say they couldn’t get a permanent job, up 26,000 in the last six months. And a great deal of the increase in employment is actually an increase in self-employment.

In the table below, we show the effect of six successive months’ change. Total employment has gone up by 70,ooo – but that is the net effect of a 46,000 fall in the number of employees and a much bigger increase in the number self-employed. Similarly, there has been an 85,000 fall in the number working full-time and a bigger increase in the number of part-timers.

 Overall, during this period, the number of employees working full-time has fallen by more than 137,000.

It’s also worrying that the benefits of the rise in employment aren’t being evenly shared. During the same period, there has been a much bigger increase in the number of men in employment than the number of women, and women’s employment rate has actually fallen:

 And the geographical distribution of gains has also been skewed, with the overall improvement disguising much poorer performance in some regions, especially the North West:

Regional labour market statistics are much more volatile than the national ones, so the figures for the North West and the East Midlands may improve, but this is another reason for only giving the employment figures one-and-a-half cheers.

For one thing, there’s a summary that starts with the claim:

Some improvement since May 2010 – employment up 250,000

That’s a very pointed date, which sent me back to the statistics. The claim is very nearly true (the increase is 243,000), but only if you use the seasonally unadjusted data. Given that the comparison is between figures for Apr-Jun 2010 and Nov-Jan 2012, you’ll get a clearer idea of the change if you use the seasonally adjusted figures, in which case the increase is 101,000. Even then, you really need to bear in mind the fact that the adult population is growing and we need bigger increases than these to maintain constant employment rates; since May 2010 the employment rate has fallen from 58.2 to 57.8 per cent (seasonally adjusted) or from 58.1 to 57.9 per cent (not seasonally adjusted).

Further down the summary slide is an old DWP chestnut:

Private sector employment up 635,000 since 2010, outstripping 380,000 fall in public sector over the same period

Again, strictly speaking this is right, but the implication that this is the result of the government’s successful policies is again very misleading. Let’s look at the figures:

So yes, there have been 634,000 new private sector jobs and 381,000 public sector jobs lost since March 2010 but very nearly half those extra private sector jobs were created in the second quarter of 2010. This is too soon after the election of the coalition government for them to claim any credit and since then more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. (At the time of the last election the labour market was benefiting from a strong recovery – it’s impossible to get a hearing for this at present, but it is true nonetheless.)

Then there’s the slide on women’s labour market experiences, claiming:

Compared to this time last year there are more women in employment, with the rate flat. But unemployment has also risen because more women are joining the labour force from inactivity.

As I pointed out last month, this is almost certainly because the ‘working age’ statistics include some women who are over retirement age but the raising of the State Pension Age is gradually reducing this proportion. The drop in economic inactivity for women will continue for quite some time because the rise in the SPA is going to be a protracted process. I won’t labour the point – Channel 4′s Fact Check and the IPPR have more detail, rubbishing Chris Grayling’s attempt to spin the data:

‘I think we are seeing more stay-at-home mums saying, “I think I’ll look for a part-time job”.’

Finally, the DWP claim that once you take the growth in full-time education into account,

youth unemployment is lower than after the 1980s and 1990s recessions

isn’t misleading, but it is dangerously complacent. The growth in educational participation is one of the most positive developments in the past 30 years, but the flip side of that is that we should pay attention to the people who don’t have a positive outcome, the people who aren’t in education or training and don’t have a job either:

Yes, things aren’t as bad as they were in 1992, but one 16 – 24 year-old in five doesn’t have a job and isn’t in full-time education and the trend is in the wrong direction. This is not the time for the DWP to be pooh-poohing concerns about what’s happening to young people.

Remember that the Office for Budget Responsibility expects net trade to contribute half of all growth this year and a quarter next year. Our trade with the Euro Area is looking a bit anaemic – between Jan 2011 and Jan 2012, our exports to Euro members grew by 5 per cent, but our imports from the Euro Area grew by 8 per cent.

It’s the figures for growth rates that particularly interested me. Turning to the growth figures for total trade (intra and extra EU), the latest figures illuminate just how difficult it is to achieve export-led growth during a global crisis, when everyone else is trying to do the same. IN the chart below, the horizontal axis measures export growth between January 2011 and January 2012. The vertical axis does the same for imports; each diamond is a European country.

Malta and Cyprus have small economies, highly reliant on tourism (and I’ll admit I don’t know what’s going on in Bulgaria) but otherwise there is a very interesting pattern that I want to concentrate on. European governments are all trying to get their countries into the bottom right hand quarter of this chart – rising exports and falling imports.

But for the most part, they find themselves in the top right – exports and imports both rising. In fact, I haven’t been able to fit in a label for all the countries, the space is so jammed. It is possible to get into the bottom right – but look at who’s doing it: Spain, Italy and Greece. The decline in imports in these countries is a function of falling demand, it has little to do with export-led growth.

The top right hand quarter is actually a good place for most of us to be, in a highly integrated Europe it’s an indicator that we’re all buying and selling goods and services; if the European economy slumps we’re likely to slide into the bottom left.

But the difficulty of getting into the bottom right suggests that the contribution of trade to growth is going to be less than the increase in exports. I’ve blogged in the past about Britain’s long-standing tendency to suck in imports and this chart highlights how difficult it will be to improve the balance of trade when everyone else wants to export too. Rising exports will make a difference, but less than might be hoped for.

First things first: the services PMI results are good, they show the strongest performance for nearly two years and they follow good results for the Indexes for manufacturing and  construction. The contrast with the generally lousy figures we’ve had for output is cheering; confidence drives the business cycle so this could mark the start of an upturn.

But, as Duncan pointed out just now, we shouldn’t confuse improvement from a very low point with economic health. It’s great when you’re wheeled out of intensive care, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to run a marathon any time soon. To underline the point, look at the charts Markit have published for the three Indexes:

What they have in common is that they’re all positive but we’re still some way from the strength we had pre-recession.Of course, if we’re at the start of an up-turn we shouldn’t expect brilliant results yet and I’m perfectly happy say the PMIs are encouraging.

But it is far too soon to talk about fears of a double-dip recession being ‘unfounded.’

No, it doesn’t seem like that now, with an even more confusing range of benefits – so, over at the TUC website, we’ve put up a guide to the 15 schemes that are running at present. Enjoy.

Some people don’t have a supportive network at times like this, which is why we have a part of the benefit system that’s designed to help: Social Fund Crisis Loans. They aren’t particularly generous, but they help people get through difficult times.

You know what’s coming next. The government is ‘localising’ the Social Fund and aims to reduce the bill for this benefit by more than 50 per cent, so last year they cut the maximum rate paid for Crisis Loan for Living Expenses from 75 per cent down to 60 per cent of the personal allowance in means-tested benefits.

Apparently, that wasn’t enough and an item on the DWP website today directs us to an announcement by Steve Webb, Minister for Pensions, last Friday. At short notice, he has decided that, from 9 April:

For non-householders facing an emergency or disaster situation, the maximum crisis loan award in relation to living expenses will be based upon 30% of the appropriate benefit personal allowance rate, rather than the current rate of 60%. … A person who does not have to maintain their own dwelling because they are living in the dwelling of someone else (who is liable for costs such as housing costs, council tax and mains fuel) does not need the same level of crisis loan award to mitigate a serious risk to their health or safety.

Bear in mind what we are talking about here: the personal allowance for an adult is £67.50 a week; 30 per cent of that is £20.25 (for under-25s the equivalent figure is £16.05, 30 per cent of £53.45.) Webb is plainly channelling the spirit of Thomas Gradgrind,

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.

In the end, Gradgrind saw the error of his ways. Unfortunately, he was just a fictional character.

Instead, the OBR now expects household consumption to be responsible for a majority of growth until 2016. Indeed, the OBR has revised its forecast growth in household consumption for this year from 0.2 to 0.5 per cent. This is despite the fact that they

expect real household disposable income growth to be subdued in both 2012 and 2013.

It has been revised upwards “mainly due to the effects of payment protection insurance (PPI) fee repayments”!

Household spending may take a while to lift off if today’s Nationwide Consumer Confidence Index figures are anything to go by.

The Nationwide report that the Index fell three points in February, with a four point fall in the sub-index for how people expect the economy to be in six months’ time. Robert Gardner, Nationwide’s Chief Economist, said

Given the uncertain economic outlook, it is no surprise that consumers remain cautious about making major purchases, with nearly half of all respondents thinking it is a bad time to make a major purchase.

And today’s figures from the British Bankers’ Association suggest people are still more interested in paying off debt than tamking on more. Oh well, perhaps another consumer scandal will come along and compo will ride to the rescue!

This claim depends largely on the £1,100 increase in the personal tax allowance that will come into effect next year. Personally, if I had £3.3 billion to spend, I’d prefer to reverse the increase in the working hours requirement for couples with children to 24 hours, the time-limiting of Employment and Support Allowance, replacing DLA with Personal Independence Payment and the freeze in Child Benefit and tax credits. These changes would directly help some of the poorest families.

The difficulty with raising the personal tax allowance to cut poverty and inequality is that the rich gain far more from this reform than the poor. That is partly because the poorest people – those with no earnings or earning below the original allowance – gain nothing from the increase.

It’s even less progressive if there are no compensating changes to the threshold for higher rate tax, which means that rich individuals gain the same as lower-paid people over the threshold. You can compensate for this by lowering the higher rate threshold, so rich individuals are no better off overall, but this has the effect of drastically increasing the number of people paying higher rate income tax.

In the end, Mr Osborne compromised with a partial reduction in the upper rate threshold. But even if he had fully reduced it the basic rate limit still tends to benefit better-off groups more than poorer groups because pay accounts for a smaller fraction of poorer groups’ income.

The Resolution Foundation showed the results of this in their Budget Submission a few days before the Budget. They divided the country into deciles (tenths) from richest to poorest and looked at who would benefit from a £500 increase in the threshold that was limited to basic rate taxpayers. The result was clearly regressive:

Finally, the government’s Budget Report shows that, over most of the income distribution, the cumulative effect of the tax, tax credit and benefit measures the government has introduced since 2010 has been regressive: As the Child Poverty Action Group put it, by 2013/14, “every household in the bottom half of the income distribution will lose a larger proportion of their income … than 4 out of 5 households in the top half.”

The most significant change has been on Child Benefit. The government is still going ahead with plans to levy extra income tax to take Child Benefit away from families that pay the higher rate; but instead of removing 100 per cent of the benefit once a taxpayer crosses the higher rate threshold they now plan to ‘taper’ it away for taxpayers with an income over £50,000. This is not an insignificant change, and the cost of the concession will peak at £390 million in 2013-14. It’s encouraging that the Chancellor felt he had to show he was responding to the widespread support for CB as a universal benefit; but the much more damaging policy of freezing Child Benefit till 2013 – 14 stays in place.

Compared with the previous two Budgets and the spending review, however, benefits and tax credits got off quite likely. In the Spending Review, for instance, welfare accounted for £18 billion of the £81 billion cuts.

But there was a menacing throwaway remark that should have sent a shiver up the backs of everyone who cares about poverty and inequality. Early in his speech the Chancellor announced:

But even with the Act, the welfare budget is set to rise to consume one third of all public spending.

If nothing is done to curb welfare bills further, then the full weight of the spending restraint will fall on departmental budgets.
The next Spending Review will have to confront this.

So I am today publishing analysis that shows that if in the next Spending Review we maintain the same rate of reductions in departmental spending as we have done in this review, we would need to make savings in welfare of £10 billion by 2016.

When you look for this analysis in the Budget Report, it isn’t immediately obvious where it is. It’s in Annex A, under the innocuous heading of “Trade-offs between AME and DEL”. The 2010 Spending Review runs out after 2014-15, and this Annex looks at spending in the following two years – further cuts in “annually managed expenditure” are going to be needed, of £6.6 billion in 2015-16, rising to £10.5 billion in 2016-17. The Annex makes it plain that benefits and tax credits are the biggest component of annually managed expenditure and that most other components “are either non-discretionary … or are self-financing.”

So brace yourself for another round of spending cuts, right at the time when the economy is supposed to be recovering. Think of what the cuts we’ve already had mean, the thousands of pounds some low-paid working families will lose next month, the cuts to disabled children’s benefits and to Employment and Support Allowance. We don’t yet know what the next round of benefit cuts will look like, but no-one can say we haven’t been warned that we face a second round that will leave social security in an even worse state.

Update at 6.16 pm: on first reading the Budget Report, I missed paragraph 1.38, which looks almost as significant as the £10 billion of cuts. This says “there will be a cap on the additional costs of Universal Credit up to £2.5 billion a year in the next spending review.”

This must mean one of two things:

• If it looks as though the cost of the Universal Credit is going to break the cap there will have to be changes to the rates or to the design; or
• UC will operate like a giant Social Fund, and when the money runs out people won’t be able to make a claim.

Either way this small paragraph could mean the destruction of Iain Duncan Smith’s dream. The UC, designed to provide a consistent guarantee that work always pays will no longer be able to do so. What will happen if more and more workers find themselves stuck on low-paying jobs? Or if unemployment rises? Or it becomes harder for disabled people or lone parents to get work?

The latest Purchasing Managers Index for services was robust, with confidence in the sector the highest for a year and the PMI for manufacturing was positive, with signs of greater confidence. These results have fed through to the Treasury round-up of forecasts for GDP growth in 2012, with the first uptick for a year:

This chart shows the average of independent forecasts for 2012 GDP growth at each month on the horizontal axis. In February, after falling for 6 months, this average remained at 0.4 per cent and this month it rose to 0.5 per cent; the average for new forecasts is better than this chart shows – 0.6 per cent.

There’s three things worth saying about this. One is that this is a positive change that we’re seeing in too many separate sources for it to be a rogue result.

But the second point is that we’re still talking about expectations, rather than changes in the real world. Business confidence is a useful tool for looking forward, but we still want to see this confirmed by results for output.

And third, we’re starting from a low base, this is still a pretty ghastly picture; we’re still below the OBR’s forecast of 0.7 per cent growth this year (that’s their November forecast, due to be updated very soon). As Duncan has pointed out, we need 0.8 per cent growth just to keep up with demographic change, otherwise GDP per capita falls.

It looks as though there may be a genuine improvement under way but it’s going to be some time before we can call it satisfactory.