MORE than 80% of the jobs created in the past 10 years have gone to foreigners - many more than the government admitted last week - according to statistics presented by the Treasury to parliament.

They also show that in the past five years the number of foreigners in work in Britain has risen by nearly 1m, while employment among the UK-born population has dropped by almost 500,000.

The figures are a further embarrassment for the government, which last week was forced to admit it had seriously underestimated the number of migrant workers in Britain.

“They are in a state of complete confusion over the figures for migrant workers,” said Chris Grayling, the Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary. “Another day brings another completely different set of statistics. They are floundering and nobody has any idea what is going on.”

Peter Hain, the work and pensions secretary, announced last week that previous estimates showing that migrants accounted for 800,000 out of 2.7m jobs created in Britain over the past 10 years were wrong, and that the true figure was 1.1m out of 2.1m. The share of jobs going to foreigners was thus 52%, rather than under 30% as originally estimated.

Gordon Brown was infuriated by the mix-up over the data, which has undermined government claims that immigration is a big benefit to Britain and provided David Cameron with a platform on which to attack the government’s record. Downing Street aides said the prime minister was irritated by what they described as a “cockup”.

But the new figures, given by the Treasury in a written Commons answer last month, suggest the picture is even worse. Alistair Darling, the chancellor, was asked for estimates of the number of migrant workers in Britain since 1997.

In a written response, Angela Eagle, a junior Treasury minister, published a letter from Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician and head of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

In it she said the number of foreign-born workers in Britain rose from 1.904m in mid1997 to 3.269m in the middle of this year, an increase of 1.365m. Over the same period, there was a rise in working-age employment among UK-born people from 23.638m to 23.948m, a rise of just 310,000. The ONS figures thus show that 81% of jobs went to people born abroad. Since 2002 the number of foreigners working in Britain has climbed by 964,000 while UK-born employment has dropped by 478,000.

“The government’s welfare to work programme is proving to be an abject failure,” said Grayling. “UK employment has barely increased over the past 10 years and it is now falling.”

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