Economic Update

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which he also made the other day in Treasury questions, when we committed to looking at how best we could take up his suggestions. I think I am right in saying—the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my right hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) will correct me if I am wrong—that the warm home discount is already moving to a more automatic system for that rebate for those on pension credit, but we will of course take his suggestions on board and figure out how best to improve what we do.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Each week, the Prime Minister tells us that there are 420,000 more people in work than there were before the pandemic, yet the Office for National Statistics tells us that there are 506,000 fewer people in work than before the pandemic. The reason for that, as the Chancellor knows, is that the Prime Minister excludes the self-employed. Will the Chancellor correct the record to show that there are in fact half a million fewer people in work, and explain why, in the circumstances, he is imposing a massive national insurance tax on jobs?

[Rishi Sunak]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the remarks I made earlier, he will see that I was clear that there are 400,000 more people on payroll, and that is the right use of that statistic. It is obviously harder to track those in self-employment because we have real-time information numbers from HMRC for those on payroll. We are proud of our track record on jobs. Unemployment in this country was forecast to reach 12%, with millions of people unemployed, but unemployment has now fallen for almost 10 straight months. It is almost back to the record lows we saw pre-pandemic, and we have record job vacancies and record low redundancies. That is all evidence that our plan for jobs is working.