Now public sector recruitment has surged

Although the Institute for Fiscal Studies said earlier this year that 1.2m public sector jobs would have to go by 2017 if the government’s deficit reduction strategy was going to work, there has been such a surge in public sector recruitment that the increase in employment overall has hit its highest figure in five years.

The Prime Minister David Cameron has continually insisted that jobs growth would be driven by the private sector and the government’s policy was to shrink the public sector.

Only last month, figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast that by 2018 the proportion of people working in the public sector would be lower than at any time since the second world war. At the end of 2012, according to the OBR, there were 600,000 fewer working in the public sector than in the first quarter of 2010, the final full quarter before the coalition government came into power.

However, the latest agency figures show a 60 per cent increase in recruitment in the education, health and medical sectors. According to the Reed Job Index, the number of public sector vacancies overall went up by 8 per cent last month to an annual rate of 17 per cent.