Mr. John McCarthy:

The CSO report says there are a total of 14 different sectors in the economy. As I have mentioned, there is employment growth in nine of those sectors. We are mainly seeing employment growth in the public sector. I stress there is no sector in the report called the public sector, but there is a sector called health care and the assumption can be made that that is essentially, but not exclusively, the public sector. We are looking at modest employment increases in the manufacturing sector. We are looking at very modest increases in the construction centre - we are never going back to building 90,000 units of housing, so we will never see again the levels of employment that we had in the bubble years. We are probably looking at increases in employment in what we call market services, but we are looking at reductions in non-market services, which are essentially the public sector, given the moratorium on public sector employment. The increases will be essentially private-sector-driven over the next couple of years.

The Chairman is right in saying that people will focus on the unemployment figure. I think we can stand over those figures. If one looks at what happened to the live register over the summer, one is looking at an annual decline in the order of 20,000. If we look at August this year compared with August last year, the number on live register had decreased by around 20,000; ditto in September. The pace of decline in the live register has picked up over the summer. There are positive signs in the labour market, but I stress that we are not getting carried away - we do not see unemployment coming back to single digits any time soon. There are problems with mismatches - the skills of the unemployed need to be better matched with areas where demand for labour is needed.