Osborne has his Budget figures wrong

Even before George Osborne opens his red box, we know a budget that fails to speak to the real concerns of working people will be a turn-off.

Because of the hard work of unions and campaigners the truth behind the recovery has frequently been revealed: Low-paid, insecure, jobs with little or no career prospects. And polling by Survation for the Unions21 Fair Work Commission, which will be revealed in full on Friday, shows the game is up for Osborne’s approach to the economy.

The Chancellor has failed to convince the majority of working people that Britain is on the up. More working people (46%) do not believe the UK economy is recovering than do (40%).

Tomorrow, if Osborne talks about the ‘global race’, the metaphor endlessly trotted out by Ministers to justify cuts in workers’ rights and welfare, we know he’s on to a loser: 44% polled by us said the ‘global race’ is in fact a ‘race to the bottom’ which the UK should not be part of, against only 27% who think the UK is part of a global race we should be trying to win.

When it comes to rolling out figures on GDP and claimant count, again, Osborne will be missing the point. The millions on zero hours contracts, under-employed or in jobs paying less than the Living Wage just don’t buy it.

When we asked 1,000 working people what they would choose as the most important thing to be improved in the UK economy, more than 1 in 3 said getting a higher proportion of people in secure full time work should be the priority.

30% of working people feel less secure in their jobs than they did in 2010, and 73% feel worse off than two years ago. This is the real-world ‘recovery’ that cannot be glossed over.

It’s job security, quality and pay that should be driving the government’s economic plan. Instead they are focused on hard measures that side-line issues of living standards and well-being.

The Fabians were right last week to call for a better way to measure the recovery and on Friday at the Unions21 annual conference I’ll be explaining why we need a Fair Work Index to bring together a range of indicators from statistics on job quality, wages, skills, safety and health and other factors influencing the world of work to help politicians monitor and evaluate their delivery.

Osborne may attempt to reassert tomorrow that the Conservatives are now the “workers’ party” as part of their attempted rebrand. He may even try to convince us again that growth, unemployment and borrowing projections are all you need – as long as you don’t look too carefully at the broken link with pay and job security. With only 1 in 5 working people (21.6%) currently expressing a voting intention of Conservative (vs 36.5% Labour), an attempted Osborne ‘workers budget’ will look like a rebrand without a rethink.

Dan Whittle is Director of Unions21. The Unions21 conference ‘Whose Recovery?’ is at the Workers’ History Museum in Manchester on Friday, including speeches from Lucy Powell MP and Lisa Nandy MP