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Comprehensive Spending Review

Before this global financial crisis, there were 3 million more jobs in the British economy than when we took over from the Conservatives. Employment in Wales was at a record high; there were more than 140,000 extra jobs. I was talking about public sector jobs being lost, but they will be more than matched by private sector job losses, as PricewaterhouseCoopers has forecast. Some 60,000 of those job losses are likely to be in Wales. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reckons that Britain could lose more than 1.6 million jobs across the country by 2015-16, a large number of which will come from Wales. More than 1 million women are now unemployed, and the number of people working part-time because they could not find full-time work has reached a record 1.15 million in October, up by 67,000.