IT WOULDN'T SEEM A SUSTAINABLE TREND:

Third of female employees work in public sector (ALLISTER HEATH, 2/20/05, The Scotsman)

ONE-THIRD of the female working population in Britain now works in the public sector after a pre-election recruitment drive by Chancellor Gordon Brown, a new report will reveal tomorrow.

Almost half of all jobs created in the UK since 1997 have been in the public sector, taking the state’s share of the workforce to one in four, the survey by broker Williams de Broë will also reveal.

These new figures fly in the face of announcements by the Chancellor that civil service and public sector jobs will be cut.

The research, which draws exclusively on little-known official figures buried in the Labour Force Survey database at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), will rekindle fears that the private sector is being squeezed out as the state sector surges.

It will also fuel accusations that most of the new state sector workers are not doctors, nurses, teachers or police officers, but clerks, administrators or regulators in back offices. This would be bad news for public sector productivity, which has performed poorly over the past five years.