To ask the Prime Minister, pursuant to his oral answer of 13 December, Official Report, column 1108, on what basis he calculates the figure of a loss of three quarters of a million jobs through the establishment of a national minimum wage.

Officials in the Department of Employment have estimated that a national minimum wage set at half male median earnings will result in the loss of about three quarters of a million jobs. This estimate uses earnings information from the new earnings survey and information on the relationship between real wages and employment set out in the published Treasury paper "The Relationship Between Employment and Wages: Empirical Evidence for the United Kingdom" (HM Treasury, January 1985).A detailed explanation of the method was placed in the House of Commons Library on 2 February 1990—"Estimating the Effect of a National Minimum Wage".