MINISTERS were told to tackle insecure work and ban zero-hours contracts today as employment figures showed Britain’s workforce has declined by 200,000 since the pandemic began.

The latest jobs figures, showing unemployment at 4.8 per cent, were released as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced derision for a Coventry speech in which he attempted to flesh out his ill-defined “levelling-up” promises.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We can’t level up the country without levelling up at work.

“With more than one million children of key worker households in poverty and 3.6 million workers stuck in insecure jobs, it’s time the government moved on from empty soundbites.

“That’s one in nine people stuck in low-paid and high-risk jobs, often on contracts with few rights and no sick pay.

“We need to make sure people aren’t being driven into worse-quality jobs. Now is the time to put an end to the scourge of insecure work by banning zero-hours contracts.”

Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “The government’s failure to secure the recovery has seen record long-term unemployment.

“Nearly half a million people have been unemployed for a year — yet the Restart jobs scheme has been live for just three days.”

In his levelling-up speech, Mr Johnson promised to “rewrite the rule book” to take a “more flexible approach to devolution” in England, said that local leaders should be “given the tools to make things happen for their communities” and suggested that counties might get directly elected mayors.

But his remarks — made at the launch of plans for a battery giga-factory in Coventry — were light on specifics and were dismissed by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as “all soundbites and no substance.”

GMB union general secretary Gary Smith said: “Promises of ‘jam tomorrow’ don’t hold much hope when it’s Boris Johnson who is making them.

“Workers and their communities need to be able to see and feel a credible levelling-up agenda by way of jobs and prosperity. 

“If the Prime Minister really wants to ‘level up’ our regions and nations then he can take a series of simple steps now: our key workers need to be valued, we need stronger employment rights, and the economy needs a proper industrial plan to help meet our net-zero ambitions.” 

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said: “We won’t be taking sermons on the mysteries of inequalities from a Prime Minister who has sanctioned the snatch-back of £20 per week from millions of the lowest-paid workers, who are on universal credit because work doesn’t pay in this country — and is poised to deny two million poor pensioners the income they need to get by.

“This government’s levelling-up promises ring hollow too when it refuses to play an active role in saving and creating decent work in this country.”

Mr Johnson’s undefined promise of investment in a “great education” was dismissed by the NAHT school leaders’ union.

Deputy general secretary Nick Brook said: “The Prime Minister is right to include schools in his vision for a fairer society, but sadly at the moment, the government’s actions do not match their lofty rhetoric.

“The government declined to fund [former education-recovery tsar] Sir Kevan Collins’s suggested catch-up plan on the grounds that it was too expensive.

“Instead, they chose to fund one-tenth of the cost of the plan.

“Even when you take into account previous Covid funding, this still only equates to around £310 per pupil per year.

“In the USA this is £1,600 and in the Netherlands it is £2,500 — far from levelling up, this looks like a race to the bottom, internationally.”