The Tory shadow work and pensions secretary on Thursday admitted that any government would struggle to prevent unemployment from rising further in the coming years.

Theresa May warned that the government’s predictions showed the jobless queue reaching 2.8m by 2011. “They are also predicting that unemployment is unlikely to return to pre-recession levels until 2016,” she said. “That, there, is the nature of the issue we’re dealing with – it is not going to be easy.”