'Numbers in dole queues will rise by more than half'

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In emergency action today, the Government announced that 6,000 job centre staff will be recruited to deal with a surge of about 600,000 in people seeking jobless benefits. An increase of that size could see the overall unemployment level spiralling towards 2.4 million.

Twenty-five JobCentre Plus centres threatened with closure, including those in Hammersmith, Kilburn and Camberwell Green, will be kept open. Previously, employment minister Tony McNulty has refused to speculate on how far unemployment will rise in the looming recession.

But the Government's jobless expectations are revealed in the fine print of the Treasury's red book for the pre-Budget report.

On p188, the Treasury has assumed that the claimant count will rise from 980,000 to 1,410,000 by next Christmas and then increase further to 1,550,000 by the end of 2010.

If the scale of the 570,000 jump in the claimant count is mirrored in the wider International Labour Organisation measurement of unemployment, it would rise from 1.82 million to nearly 2.4 million.

But this is still far lower than a CBI estimate which believes joblessness could peak at 2.9 million. The Local Government Association says 650,000 jobs will go in London and the South-East alone.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Chris Grayling said: "This is the first time that the Government has indicated the scale of the job crisis that we face.

"The Government is clearly being much more optimistic than some forecasters. I very much hope they are right." The Treasury document says the 570,000 figure is not a government prediction but an assumption accepted by Alistair Darling in working out his economic blueprint. "This is a cautious assumption based on the average of external forecasts," it said.

Announcing how £1.3 billion set aside to help the jobless in the pre-Budget report will be used, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell said JobCentrePlus had been preparing over the last nine months for unemployment to rise.