Government Employment Strategy

That intervention has highlighted to the Minister the sort of detail that the Select Committee went into. We not only questioned witnesses on numerators and denominators—I had to think back for a minute to my schoolgirl maths to try to remember what they were—but compared ratio with rate. I will not question the Minister on that. We all know that statistics can be misleading. As the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) said, they should be tools to help to develop policy, so I want to start from the basis of an analysis of whether the parameters in which the statistics are determined are correct. More importantly I wish to reinforce what I think is the key message of our report, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North referred, which is what we mean by employment. We let the statisticians and the Government off too easily by saying that because somebody has been in employment for 13 weeks the job is done. It is not. A lot of people start work and leave it a lot more quickly than that, and a lot leave just after the 13 weeks. Surely the success of an employment strategy is whether people are still in work after six months or a year. We have recommended 26 weeks.