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One of the most striking claims comes from the Conservatives. Here's the top line of their recent press release:

"Census statistics, highlighted by the Conservatives, have revealed there are 5 million people who have never worked under this Labour Government".

I would quibble with the phrase "there ARE 5 million..." These figures are drawn from the last national census. That census was carried out in 2001. So it would be more accurate to say "in 2001 there were 5 million ....."

Nonetheless, it is a striking number. And it does highlight some of the problems of "worklessness".

There are some almost equally striking - and much more up to date - figures release today by the Office for national Statistics.

Again I will quote the top line of the press release:

"The number of working-age people in workless households in April-June 2009 was 4.8 million, up 500,000 on a year earlier."

At first glance that 4.8 million figure looks very high. The last official figure for unemployment was 2.4 million.

But there are a much larger number of people - 8 million - who are classified as "economically inactive" - that is people of working age who are not working or looking for work. That includes 2 million long term sick, 2.1 million students, 2.3 million who are looking after family and 576,000 in early retirement.

So the 4.8 million people in workless households includes a lot of people who are claiming incapacity benefit or for other reasons are not currently looking for work.

But the figure highlights the extent of worklessness in Britain. And one of the most striking figures in the ONS report is that there are 1.9 million children in workless households.

Overall, if we remove pensioners from the numbers, more than one in eight people in the UK today lives in a household in which nobody has a job.

Perhaps not surprisingly, lone parent households are particularly likely to have no-one working - almost 40%.

Worklessness is also very unevenly distributed around the country. In the North East of England and Inner London around 23% of all households have no-one working. In the South and East of England the corresponding figure is close to 12 per cent."