Third of female employees work in public sector

ONE-THIRD of the female working population in Britain now works in the public sector after a pre-election recruitment drive by Chancellor Gordon Brown, a new report will reveal tomorrow.

Almost half of all jobs created in the UK since 1997 have been in the public sector, taking the state’s share of the workforce to one in four, the survey by broker Williams de Bro will also reveal.

These new figures fly in the face of announcements by the Chancellor that civil service and public sector jobs will be cut.

The research, which draws exclusively on little-known official figures buried in the Labour Force Survey database at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), will rekindle fears that the private sector is being squeezed out as the state sector surges.

It will also fuel accusations that most of the new state sector workers are not doctors, nurses, teachers or police officers, but clerks, administrators or regulators in back offices. This would be bad news for public sector productivity, which has performed poorly over the past five years.

David Smith, chief economist at Williams de Bro and the author of the research, said: "The rise in the public sector workforce is even greater than we previously thought. Brown’s claim to be going on an economy drive and to be cutting unnecessary jobs has had no impact on the figures."

The cumulative increase in the public sector workforce since 1997 could reach one million workers within a year, the figures suggest.

In total, 861,231 additional public sector jobs were created between the summer of 1997 and the autumn of 2004, taking the total to 6,906,922. That is a rise of 14.2% from 1997.

During the same period, total employment in the UK has surged from 26,633,000 to 28,541,000 - a rise of 1,908,000, or 7.2%. This means that Brown has been recruiting workers at twice the rate of the growth in jobs overall since he became Chancellor.

The figures also show that 45.1% of the rise in employment since mid-1997 has come from the public sector, and they reveal that the rise in state workers is a little greater than the decline in claimant-count unemployment, which has fallen by 787,000 between the second quarter of 1997 and the final quarter of last year.

As a result of Brown’s recruitment spree, the share of public sector workers has increased from 22.7% of the workforce to 24.2%. Excluding the self-employed and looking only at employees, the rise has been even greater: the public sector’s share has reached 27.9%.

The overwhelming majority of new recruits to the public sector have been female, the figures show. An additional 669,987 work for the state, equivalent to 77.8% of the total rise in public sector workers since Brown became Chancellor.

A record 4,439,883 women now work for the government, equivalent to 64.3% of the total public sector workforce. Roughly 33.9% of the female workforce is employed by the public sector, up from 30.4% in the autumn of 1998, before Brown’s spending spree began in earnest. By contrast, only 15.8% of men work for the public sector today, almost exactly the proportion in 1997.

The figures are likely to feature in the coming election campaign, as they suggest that most of the new jobs are not for frontline workers. The Labour Party claims to have increased the number of doctors and nurses in the NHS by 100,000 since 1997, and to have recruited an additional 28,000 teachers, taking the total to its highest in 20 years.

It also claims police numbers are at record levels, up by more than 12,500 since 1997, assisted by more than 4,000 new community support officers. But these figures only add up to 144,500, suggesting that the remaining 716,731 are not doctors, nurses, teachers or police officers.