Nick Ferarri was left bewildered as Alison McGovern, the current employment minister, seemingly couldn’t answer his question on how many job vacancies there are in the UK at the moment.

The LBC presenter spoke to Alison this morning, Friday 18, about her initiative to get people back to work, asking if she knew “the current level of vacancies”.

Ms McGovern replied: “I think they’ve recently announced it. Is it not about 1.8 million? Something like that.”

Stunned, Mr Ferrari told her: “You are the employment minister, minister, aren’t you?” Pressing again, Mr Ferrari asked: “You are talking about people getting into jobs and job opportunities. So what is the level of vacancies at the moment?”

Ms McGovern responded with a different and prompt answer claiming, “it’s just above the number of unemployed people”.

Later in the interview, the employment minister said: “We want to create better jobs in places that don’t have enough good jobs.”

Unsatisfied with her response, Mr Ferrari pressed for a third time, asking: “Yes, but what is the number of vacancies currently?”

To which Ms McGovern hastily said: “I think, forgive me I – it was just there was an update recently, and it’s just above the number of unemployed people that we have. It’s around… just over… So we have about 1, 1.5 million people…”.

Mr Ferrari then cut off her sentence to say: “You don’t know”.

“So you’re launching an initiative to get people back into work and you don’t know how many vacancies there are currently?” he added.

“Forgive me,” uttered Ms McGovern, before Mr Ferrari ended the discussion by answering the question for her, saying: “It’s 841,000, let’s end it there.”

Labour’s back-to-work plan includes a major programme of reform to support more people to work and bring the benefits bill down. The party pledged a new combined national jobs and careers service, new local plans for work and a youth guarantee.