All of these things may be true, Mr. Chairman. We know there are structural changes in the economy and that there's extra growth in part-time working arrangements as opposed to full-time arrangements. Taking account of those things, it still appears to us there is excess capacity in the labour market. It is primarily a youth thing, but not entirely. We have five percentage points lower participation in the workforce by youths aged 15 to 25 than we had prior to the great financial crisis. Now I realize we're talking about different people now, because 10 years have gone by and they may be staying in school longer—which is all well and good, and the effect of a recession is often that people spend more time at school—but the fact of the matter is that we believe there's extra capacity there.
We've tried to quantify that in a separate paper, which was published alongside our monetary policy report. In fact, we simulate the effect. If we're able to get an extra one percentage point of extra economic capacity by this reintegration into the workforce—more conversion from part time to full time and reparticipation by those youths—that is a very significant thing for us to achieve, whether it's done by helping through other policies to make it easier, re-skilling them, or by other means.
All those things can help us, but it also means, to the extent that it occurs, that we will undershoot our inflation target one and a half to two years from now. Therefore, we have to watch for it happening, and hope that it will happen to a certain extent and that we can allow it to occur by watching it unfold and not nipping it in the bud.