FactCheck: have the Tories done their sums correctly?

It was all guns blazing for George Osborne and the Tories this morning.

The chancellor was in Twickenham, saying he was going to “fire a starting gun on a very important election”. No point in firing a starting gun on an unimportant election, is there?

“Our message is simple,” he tweeted. “Let’s stay on the road to a stronger economy.”

In case anyone missed his simple message, he tweeted a picture a minute later, of the Conservatives’ election campaign poster.

FactCheck couldn’t resist but pick up the gauntlet.

The claims

“1.75 million more people in work”

The poster doesn’t spell out any time frame for this one – 1.75 million more people in work since when? – so we’re presuming it’s since the last election.

The Office for National Statistics has figures on the number of people working, and they’re presented in three-month intervals.

From May to July 2010, there were 29.325 million people working. From August to October 2014, the figure was 30.796 million people.

Our sums said there were 1.471 million more people are now in work.

Why the discrepancy, we asked Conservative HQ?

Because, they said, the baseline should begin before they came to power, not when they came to power. From February to April 2010, there were 29.048 million people working.

Which adds up – from that point, there are 1.748 million more people in work.

“760,000 more businesses”

Again, the ONS collects figures on how many businesses there are. They say that there were 2,263,645 business entities in March 2014. In March 2010, there were 2,100,370 businesses.

Calculator says that’s 163,275 more businesses.

Quite different to 760,000, we suggested to Tory HQ. Where did they get that from?

They directed us towards the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ (BIS) statistical release on business populations.

This said there were 5,243,100 private sector businesses in 2014, and there were 4,483,000 in 2010 – the year the Tories used as their baseline. Leaving a difference of 760,100.

How can the numbers be so different? Because BIS includes unregistered businesses which don’t pay VAT or PAYE and have no employees – in other words, self-employed people working alone, some in partnership. The ONS, on the other hand, only includes registered businesses which pay VAT and/or PAYE.

According to the source the Tories have used, there are 760,000 more businesses. They just haven’t mentioned that 707,200 of them have no employees.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-tories-sums-correctly/19765?utm

Dodgy Donors and Lies

Get these clowns out. Can't even do their sums right

We haven’t researched the picture’s origin, but we have taken a look at the claims.
“1.75 million more people in work”
That’s right. Total employment has increased substantially since the election, from about 29 million people in February-April 2010 to around 30.8 million people in August-October 2014. The Conservatives are counting from before the party was actually elected, and the size of the increase depends on the period chosen.
About 1.3 million workers in this increase were in full-time employment.

But the population has grown too. There were around 1.3 million more people in the UK in midyear 2013 than there were in midyear 2010.
The employment rate takes out the effects of changes in the population on employment.

This has still increased— about 73% of people aged between 16 and 64 were employed in July-September 2014—up from around 70% at the election.
However, this should be viewed in context: the employment rate would be expected to rise after a recession.
“760,000 more businesses”
That’s right too. The government have used the Business Population Estimates produced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which show that from the start of 2010 to the start of 2014, the number of private sector businesses in the UK increased by 760,000.
But the BIS figures include a 707,000 increase in businesses that have no employees—mainly self-employed workers.

https://fullfact.org/factcheck/economy/campaign_posters_full_picture-37962

Which is still new businesses so basically the left now do not count people having their own business as a business now, how low can they get.




Keep the tories in and ensure we do not have incompetent Labour back in that would ruin the economy and cover up child sex scandals through PC, failing many of our children. Having daft indexes for poverty which is not even poverty like we see real poverty in Africa
You only need to have common sense to see what what shower of shit Labour really are and nobody ants to see another decade of grooming gangs covered up by the labour party.



Epic failure on the left to now claim some businesses are not businesses, so the Tories did not lie and have every right to go off the BIS figure was seen is correct as there have been 760,000 new businesses.