Economy

The number of people in work in the UK hit 29.6 million in August-October – the most ever — according to today's figures from the Office for National Statistics. So despite GDP still languishing 3 per cent below pre-recession levels, employment has fully recovered, with half a million jobs created in the last year: The rise in employment has been thanks to the private sector more than making up for the job cuts in the public sector.

'We've done quite a good job at demonstrating the limitations of economic forecasting,' half-joked Office for Budget Responsibility Chairman Robert Chote at the start of his Treasury Select Committee appearance this morning. And he spent a lot of his answers emphasising those limitations, while robustly defending himself against charges that the OBR is just making it up. His challenge was to explain to sceptical MPs why we should pay attention to the OBR's new forecasts, given that their previous ones have missed by so much. For the OBR's economic forecasts — rather than its forecasts for the public finances — Chote admitted that 'we don't have access to any information that other forecasters don't.

We've only had two days to digest it, but the early signs from YouGov are that George Osborne's Autumn Statement has gone down a lot better than his March Budget. The Chancellor's personal ratings are still dire – just 24 per cent think he's doing a good job — but that's a lot better than 15 per cent five months ago. His approval rating had tanked after the Budget, but Osborne does seem to have turned that around: And the government's approval rating on the economy similarly seems to have been helped by the Autumn Statement, and is back up to pre-Budget levels: Though a 35 per cent approval rating on the economy is not exactly great, it's notably better than the government's overall approval rating, which is currently just 26 per cent.

1. Growth evaporating. The Office for Budget Responsibility once again downgraded its growth forecasts for 2012-13 and, for the first time, also did so for 2014-16. Despite that, the OBR is still slightly more optimistic than the average independent forecaster: 2. A seven year slump. On the OBR forecasts, it will now take until the end of 2014 to get back to where we were before the crash. In the 1930s, it took 'just' four years to recover: 3. Slower deficit reduction. The weaker economic outlook means the government will be borrowing more than expected. When George Osborne delivered his first Budget in 2010, the OBR predicted he'd get the deficit down to £20 billion in 2015-16. It now says it'll be £82 billion.

Hiring Mark Carney may just be George Osborne’s best move since becoming Chancellor. Britain badly needed a break from the failed economic consensus which still hangs around the Bank of England like a bad smell. In August, The Spectator implored the Chancellor to mount a global search. When Carney ruled himself out, I gave up hope and resigned myself to Paul Tucker, who would be likely to keep Britain on its current Faustian monetary path paved with freshly-minted banknotes. Instead, Osborne has succeeded in hiring one of the best-qualified of all the Queen’s 137 million subjects — from a country that knows a thing or two about economic crises and how to handle them.

Today's employment figures don't contain much new to shout about. The number of people in work — although it rose by 100,000 on the previous quarter — is actually down very slightly from last month's record high (but still above the pre-recession peak, just). Unemployment fell by 49,000 from Q2 to Q3, although that's well within the Labour Force Survey's margin of error (so we can't be certain that it fell at all). The best news in today's figures — from the government's point of view — is probably that the headline unemployment rate is now 7.8 per cent, very slightly below the 7.9 per cent rate when the coalition took office (though again, it's worth remembering that the margin of error on that figure is +/– 0.3 percentage points).

After falling to 2.2 per cent in September, inflation — as measured by the Consumer Prices Index — rose to 2.7 per cent in October. On the Retail Prices Index, inflation rose from 2.6 per cent to 3.2 per cent. The main cause of the rise is the government's changes to university tuition fees, which put the maximum annual fee up to £9,000. Today's figures are the first to include the effects of the policy — with the education index 19.7 per cent higher than last year. But food prices were up too — by 0.5 per cent on last month and 3.3 per cent on last year. The good news — unusually — comes from energy bills. Gas prices in October were unchanged from September, and 1 per cent lower than in October last year. Electricity prices fell by 0.