Hello and welcome to the more or less election podcast number three, a collection of interviews

that were first broadcast on radio force PM programme with Eddie Mayer. Tim Halford and Ruth

Alexander took turns to shine a light on the numbers of the campaign.

On Friday the 17th of April the Office for National Statistics published its

final set of labour figures before the election. Ruth Alexander was invited on to discuss them.

So employments up as we know there are more than 31 million adults in employment now.

That gives us a rate of 73.4%. The highest employment rate since comparable records began in the

in the 70s 1971. One of the big trends is rising self-employment and the unemployment rate is down

to 5.6%. That's the lowest it's been since July 2008 and much lower than the Eurozone average

and better than the US. David Cameron says he's overseen a jobs

medical. He does, yes, the conservative campaign message is that two million jobs have been created

since 2010. About a thousand jobs a day as they also like to say and it's about right but it's

politically difficult for David Cameron. About half of these jobs have gone to people who weren't

born in the UK. Although a good chunk of these people are UK national. So about a third of Cameron's

new jobs have gone to non-UK nationals. Taking a longer term view it's interesting the number of

non-UK nationals working in the UK has tripled since 1997 when new labour came into office.

There were almost a million then and almost three million today making up just under 10%

of the workforce and this is in large part down to new countries entering the EU with their

populations gaining the right to work here. Labour argues the new jobs are low quality.

Yes although we struggle here because there's no official job quality indicator we can turn to.

What we do know is that part-time jobs were a fifth of all new jobs over the past year.

However 16% of people with part-time jobs 1.3 million people said that really they wanted a

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