WRITING in this column two months ago I explained why I thought the Live Register figures should never be used as a means of assessing either the level or trend of unemployment.
My principal reason for insisting on the irrelevance of the Live Register was that the great majority of women currently on it - roughly 70,000 of about 100,000 - are legitimately registered without in fact being unemployed. This is because they are either part time workers entitled to supplementary payments; wives splitting their husbands' unemployment payments in lieu of adult dependants' allowances; or women registering for credits.
However, as at the time I wrote that article no data were available in respect of non legitimate unemployment claims, I did not attempt to assess the magnitude of this additional reason for scepticism about the validity of Live Register figures as a measure of actual unemployment.
But it now seems clear that, in addition to these 70,000 legitimate women claimants on the Live Register who are not unemployed, a significant proportion of the other claimants are not in fact unemployed but are nevertheless claiming unemployment benefit or assistance. In this situation it is, I think, important to try to construct from the data now available some kind of approximate picture of the real employment situation here.
Examining the CSO survey one can see straight away that roughly one eighth of the initial sample of 2,672 have to be discarded - mostly because the names provided to the CSO by the Department of Social Welfare were not in fact from the Live Register, or because those named had got jobs in the meantime. The relevant sample is thus about 2,225.
Of these 2,225 addresses some 2 per cent were non existent, and in 31 per cent of the remaining cases it was found that the person listed on the Live Register as living at that address was not among the usual residents whose names were supplied to the Labour Force Survey interviewer - although in half these cases people of the same surname lived there.
NOW it should not be assumed that all, or anything like all, of these cases are fraudulent. Live Register addresses are often very out of date. It appears that the Department of Social Welfare does not subsequently seek to update - nor it seems does it check - the addresses that are given when a person first registers as unemployed. And, of course, especially in urban areas, younger people in particular are highly mobile.
Furthermore, in a significant number of cases the fact that the names of occupants supplied to the Labour Force Survey interviewers did not seem to include that of the Live Register claimant must have been due to confusion rather than fraud. For some are commonly known by a forename different from that on their birth certificate, and when a woman marries it is her married name that will have been given to the Labour Force interviewer.
Now it has to be remembered that these interviewers were not aware of the purpose of the exercise and, believing this to be a normal Labour Force interview, would have had no reason to investigate issues such as mobility, divergence of forenames, or changes of surname on marriage. Their job was simply to record the information given.
Against this background it could well be that one third, or perhaps even more, of the address problems are to be accounted for by these confusion factors, rather than by fraud.
After the results of the survey have been reweighted to allow for under representation of long term unemployed in the sample - which for technical reasons had been deliberately skewed in favour of the short term unemployed it emerges that 7.5 per cent of the sample were established as working full time, and almost 5 per cent part time and not under employed. In other words this 5 per cent were content with part time employment, and were seeking neither additional part time work nor a full time job.
Finally, a further 15-16 per cent were not established as not "economically active". In fact these members of the Live Register did not regard themselves as part of the labour force at all.
That left only 36-37 per cent of the sample who were found and who described themselves as unemployed - of whom about one twelfth were only "marginally attached to the labour force" - which means they were either laid off and not looking for work, available for work but only passively looking for it, or generally discouraged at seeing no prospect of work.
Thus, just 33 to 34 per cent of the sample were reported as being at the address they had given when they originally registered with the Department of Social Welfare and as being unemployed and actively seeking work. Applying this percentage to the current Live Register total one arrives at a figure of about 95,000.
TO this figure must, however, be added that proportion of the "wrong address" people who were the victims of misunderstandings - and this could swell by a further 30,000, or perhaps more, the total of people on the Live Register who are unemployed and genuinely seeking work.
Furthermore, it would be quite wrong to conclude from this that there are only some 125,000 people who are unemployed and actively looking for work. For it is well established that very many married women are unemployed and actively seeking work but have not sought to be on the Live Register because they would be excluded by the means test from any financial benefit.
Among those who are close to this problem there is a feeling that this group could number 30,000 or more, bringing the true figure for the numbers unemployed and actively seeking work nearer 160,000.
How would such a figure for genuine unemployment involving people actively seeking work, derived in large measure from the Live Register data, with appropriate adjustments, compare with the Labour Force Survey figures?
We will not know the Labour Force Survey unemployment figure for April 1996 until some time next month, but one can make an educated guess. The most recent Central Bank estimate of average 1996 unemployment is 169,000, and the ESRI has estimated that this year's April unemployment figure will have been close to the average figure for the year.
This would seem to point to a Labour Force Survey figure of around 170,000 - but the eventual figure could in fact be lower than this as in this year, as previously, there is probably a tendency in official circles to "play safe" by underestimating the growth in employment.
Thus the Live Register figures when adjusted to allow for the factors mentioned earlier seem broadly compatible with the probable Labour Force Survey figure for the current year. Together they suggest that out of a labour force of perhaps 1,455,000 last April some 165,000, or 11.5 per cent were unemployed and actively seeking work.
On the issue of fraud, its scale may therefore be a good deal less than has been suggested by early reports which failed to take account of the factors mentioned. I would doubt whether the numbers claiming fraudulently exceed one fifth to one sixth of the Live Register, involving a figure of around £150-200 million a year, or about half the figure that has been floated in the media.
It is, of course, clear that effective steps need to be taken to eliminate fraudulent claims on this scale - in the interest both of the Exchequer and of the credibility of the social welfare system. For at a period when right wing anti welfare pressures are so persistent, tolerance or minimisation of social welfare fraud is dangerous to social progress and cohesion.
But it should be recognised that in the case of many unskilled, older workers who have been unemployed for a long time it is unrealistic to demand of them that they be out looking for jobs that don't exist, and even if they did would not be open to such workers in the absence of adequate re education and retraining facilities.
Common sense and common humanity, rather than neo Victorian attitudes and bureaucratic nitpicking, must play their part in any measures designed to tackle fraud in relation to unemployment payments.