Ed Miliband faced fresh controversy today over a claim that four-fifths of new private sector jobs have been gobbled up by London.
The independent Office for National Statistics told the Evening Standard that the figures used by the Labour leader were not its “preferred” way of comparing regional jobs.
Instead, it endorsed a different set of data which shows the opposite — that four-fifths of new jobs are created outside London, with Yorkshire and the east of England gaining particularly.
The ONS statement is a blow to Mr Miliband, who was wrong-footed yesterday by Conservative charges that the figures he used were two years out of date and inappropriate. He dropped the claim from a speech he made in Leeds announcing a new growth strategy to boost the regions despite newspapers being given a pre-briefing including the statistic. His spokesman said: “Ed stands by the words fully, but he decided to speak off-the-cuff rather than from a script.”
Mr Miliband’s figure came from a report by the Centre for Cities think tank, which was based on an ONS regional business survey last updated in 2012.
An Evening Standard analysis of the ONS preferred data, published in June, showed that since 2010 there have been 567,000 private sector jobs created in London and 1.6 million in the regions — which means three in four were created outside the capital. In the past year, four in five were created outside London.
