Ministers are debating whether to delay youth minimum wage increases, worried about the impact on jobs. But here's what they're not telling you: according to the ONS's own labour market data, Britain somehow lost 8.35 million jobs between 2020 and 2021 — jobs that may never have existed in the first place.

The numbers are staggering. In 2020, the ONS recorded 12.5 billion in their aggregate labour market measure. By 2021, that figure had collapsed to 4.17 billion. That's not a recession — that's a statistical meltdown.

This isn't about COVID job losses. We know unemployment rose during the pandemic, but not by eight million. We know furlough kept people technically employed. What we're looking at here is either the biggest data revision in British economic history, or evidence that our labour market statistics have been fundamentally broken for years.

Think about what this means for every policy debate happening right now. When politicians argue about minimum wage rates, they're using employment figures that apparently overshot reality by 67% just two years ago. When they worry about job creation, they're working from a baseline that may have been fantasy.

The timing couldn't be worse. As inflation finally shows signs of cooling, workers need reliable data about the job market more than ever. But if the ONS can't tell us how many people are actually employed, how can anyone make informed decisions about their career, their wages, or their future?

This statistical chaos extends beyond employment. The same ONS data collection methods that produced these impossible numbers are used across government departments. If labour market figures can be off by billions, what about housing statistics? Crime data? NHS waiting lists?

The pattern in the data suggests a systematic problem, not a one-off error. The figures climb steadily from 2017 to 2020, then crash. Either Britain experienced the most dramatic economic collapse in modern history — one that somehow escaped all other economic indicators — or our statistical infrastructure is fundamentally compromised.

For ordinary workers, this matters immediately. Every time your employer cites 'labour market conditions' to justify pay freezes, every time a recruiter mentions 'current employment trends', they're potentially working from data that's billions of jobs away from reality.

The ONS needs to explain what happened here. Not in technical notes buried on their website, but in plain English that politicians and workers can understand. Because right now, Britain is making economic policy in the dark.