My Lords, after that Panglossian account, I wonder whether the noble Lord who has just spoken was knocking on the same doors as I was a couple of weeks ago. Many Labour politicians who were knocking on doors found a deep sense of insecurity right across the country, apart from in London, where the experience is generally not the same as that of the rest of the country. All the statistics show that—not least the fact that house prices in London are double the rest of the country. The rest of the country more or less moves together.
There is no easy way to fix this, but fix it we must because otherwise we will be left in the position of those people on the continent who remember the 1930s. I remember that when I was on the Bruno Kreisky commission on unemployment in Europe one wise old bird said, “Well if people don’t believe that politicians can do anything about their insecurity in employment, why do we need any politicians?”. That has dangerous implications. I do not want to exaggerate, but the malaise is not unrelated to some of the types of data that we have been hearing about. I will give two examples.
Involuntary temporary and part-time work is growing, but the actual numbers are startling. I was going to say, “Hands up who know that the ONS has shown that these categories of involuntary temporary and part-time work have risen by 66% and 103% respectively since 2008”. A new analysis by the ONS of zero-hour contracts shows the scale of insecure work. There are 1.4 million such contracts—or 2.7 million if the 1.3 million contracts for people who are reported as doing no work over the two-week time period used for the analysis are included.
There is another example of an unjustifiably satisfied gloss being put on the state of our economy at the moment. I pick up the point that arose from a remark by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, with whom I always enjoy crossing swords on these occasions. It is true, as she said, that no major advanced economy has grown as fast as we have in the past 12 months. But the explanation for that is very largely that, in the vernacular,
if you dig a bigger hole, you have to grow faster to get out of it. I will give you the statistics. If we look at the total position of the British economy and the German economy from the same benchmark starting date of the same quarter of 2008, our position as of April is that we are still two thirds of 1% lower than before we fell off the cliff. We are still below the peak. Germany, from the same benchmark starting date, is now 3.83% higher than before the peak. That is the relevant statistic—not how fast we are growing in one or two quarters at the present time, welcome as that is.