At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday (14 May), we heard a number of seemingly conflicting claims about unemployment and jobs figures.
The Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch claimed that “unemployment is up 10% since the election”—but was later challenged by Labour MP Jake Richards, who raised a point of order and claimed that figure was “completely and utterly incorrect”.
Mrs Badenoch also claimed “the ONS estimates that there are 100,000 fewer jobs than a year ago”. Yet the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed “we’ve got 200,000 new jobs”.
We’ve contacted Mrs Badenoch and Mr Starmer to confirm where their respective figures were taken from, but it appears that each of these claims are based on different datasets.
There are several different sources of employment data. While the Labour Force Survey (LFS) has historically been used for headline employment and unemployment figures, it’s worth noting that its reliability has come under scrutiny since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) currently warns that due to increased volatility in Labour Force Survey data, “estimates of change should be treated with additional caution”.
The ONS advises that people “make use of a wide range of data sources to inform their views on the labour market, balancing the information provided across survey and administrative data sources as well as data on relevant concepts like earnings and vacancies”.
Mrs Badenoch’s claim that “unemployment is up 10%” is, according to a Conservative party post on X (formerly Twitter), based on LFS data on the number of people who are unemployed.
In the period April-June 2024 (the last full period before the general election on 4 July 2024) an estimated 1,467,000 people were unemployed, according to the survey. As of January-March 2025 (the latest data available) this figure stood at 1,614,000—a 10% increase.
Meanwhile the headline unemployment rate (the number of unemployed people divided by the economically active population) increased over this period from 4.2% to 4.5%—an increase of around 7% (or 0.3 percentage points). Mr Richards confirmed to Full Fact it was the unemployment rate which he was referring to in his point of order, when he described Ms Badenoch’s claim as “incorrect”—he told us that he believed unemployment relative to employment was “the only useful metric”.
It’s worth noting that both sets of statistics are published as three-month averages, and the picture they give of how unemployment has changed varies significantly depending on the exact starting point used.
When we asked the ONS about this, it told us that if a particular month is of interest, it would usually choose a period where that month is the midpoint. Comparing June-August 2024 (the midpoint of which is July 2024, when the general election was held) with the most recent data, for instance, shows a 12% increase in the number of unemployed people and a 10% increase in the unemployment rate.
Comparing July-September 2024 with the most recent data, as some have suggested, shows a 7% increase in the number of unemployed people and a 5% increase in the unemployment rate, though Labour was already in office for the vast majority of this baseline period.
As mentioned earlier, all comparisons based on LFS data over this period should be treated with caution.
An alternative measure of unemployment to LFS-based data, also published by the ONS, is the claimant count, which measures the number of people receiving benefits for the principal reason of being unemployed.
The provisional claimant count in April 2025 was 1.726 million. This is roughly 5% up on June 2024 (the last full month of the Conservative government), but about 2% down on July 2024 (when Labour took office).
What about jobs?
We also saw contrasting claims on jobs from Mrs Badenoch and Mr Starmer.
Mrs Badenoch claimed “the ONS estimates that there are 100,000 fewer jobs than a year ago”. This appears to broadly match pay-as-you-earn real-time information (PAYE RTI) data published by the ONS, which shows that in April 2025 there were 30,301,776 payrolled employees—a decrease of around 106,000 compared to April 2024, when payrolled employment stood at 30,407,550.
It’s worth noting that these figures do not include self-employed people—the ONS says this dataset is therefore “not a measure of jobs”.
Mr Starmer meanwhile claimed that “we’ve got 200,000 new jobs”. While he didn’t give a specific time period for this figure, it broadly matches workforce jobs data over a different time period.
These separate figures show that the number of jobs (including both employees and the self-employed) increased from 36,720,000 in June 2024 to 36,909,000 in December 2024 (the latest available data)—an increase of 189,000.
The ONS website has much more detail on the different sources of labour market data and what each covers.