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Liz Kendall, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, wants to get more of us working. In her first major speech this week she set out a string of new measures. Among them was the aim to get another 2 million people working who for various reasons are not doing so.

The target is to try to get the labour participation rate up to 80 per cent. If that were to happen it would certainly be a massive help towards balancing the country’s books, for it would both bring in more tax revenue as well as cutting the welfare bill. But it would also be an extraordinary achievement, because among the major economies, the UK already has one of the highest participation rates in the world. In the G7, only Germany is higher. So what’s up?

Some facts. Liz Kendall described the UK labour market in strongly negative terms: “Employment is down, unemployment is up, and our workforce is shrinking.” That was a very political way of putting things. A House of Commons research paper broadly supported that point. But there are a lot of problems with the labour markets stats, and the most recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates show that the number of payroll employees is actually at an all-time high at 30.4 million, up 1.4 million on pre-pandemic levels.

Unemployment at 4.4 per cent is indeed up from its trough of 3.6 per cent in the middle of 2022, and is higher than Japan, Germany and the US, but it is lower than Canada, Italy and France. As for the size of the workforce, it must be pretty close to an all-time record, and is certainly much higher than it was before the pandemic. Most countries would be delighted to have as solid a labour market as we do.

However, Kendall is right that there are big problems. One is that there has been a large increase in people since the pandemic who are off work because they are unwell. As a result, the participation rate........

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