Asylum claims are down a bit in Q1 of 2026. But this parliament is still on course to see the largest number of asylum claims ever. Asylum claims continue to rattle along at about three times the rate we saw in the period from 2005 to 2020:

Labour boast that the asylum backlog is down. But despite waving huge numbers of people through, with grant rates that are high by historical standards, the asylum appeals backlog is up!

It is true that the number of people in hotels is down - but the number in the care of the Home Office hasn’t fallen.

In June 2024 there were 100,995 asylum seekers in Home Office supported accommodation, as of March 2026 there are now 97,519. But Afghan resettlement is counted separately, even though it raises many of the same issues for local communities. In June 2024 there were 28,985 Afghans in Home Office accommodation, as of March 2026 there are now 38,617 (Reg_01).

So we had 129,980 Asylum seekers and Afghans in Summer 2024 and now have more - 136,136

While the use of hotels is down, people are just moving into dispersal accommodation and the numbers on the Afghan resettlement scheme continues to grow:

“Dispersal accommodation” is where the government pays various firms like Serco large sums of money, and they rent housing in suburban areas in which they house people.

So instead of having a few large visible sites, you end up with a much larger number of small sites. As part of this there is a flow from urban areas to the rest of the country. Here is the change in the total number of asylum seekers and people on the Afghan scheme since Labour took office. Places where numbers are down show as red, places where numbers are up are blue.

So for all of the government’s boasting about shutting hotels, for most people in most areas the experience is of an increase in asylum seekers being housed locally.

Since Labour have taken office, the number of asylum seekers in “dispersed accommodation” alone has risen from:

- 3 to 266 in South Kesteven, Lincolnshire

- 5 to 145 in East Staffordshire

- 4 to 198 in Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire

- 15 to 160 in South Lanarkshire

- 4 to 137 in West Northamptonshire

Rather like blowing on a dandelion, the Home Office are dispersing people all over the country. The government hopes this will make the problem less visible. I think there is every chance that it will backfire, as people are left high and dry in the villages and town suburbs where there is very little social infrastructure to connect to and few people in a similar situation. In certain ways it will make the challenges more noticeable to many people.

That’s not the real problem

The Starmer government has always tried to frame the issue as being about the asylum backlog and the numbers in the care of the Home Office. They have failed even in these terms.

But that isn’t the real issue. You could make the asylum backlog disappear tomorrow by granting everyone asylum. But in the real world you would still have a load of people relying on the taxpayer - and indeed you would encourage more people to come.

Looking, as I have above, at the numbers in Home Office accommodation is really understating the impact of Starmer failing to solve the small boats problem.

There might be a (similar) stock of people being looked after by the Home Office, but a lot of people have flowed into and out of that stock in the meantime.

The Home Office can get people off its books and make the statistics look better by simply waving more people through, and acceptance rates are very high by historical standards.

But the people who are either granted refugee status or simply disappear (because they are not monitored) do not disappear.

Though able to work the employment rate for those who arrive as refugees is low.

So they often remain supported by the taxpayer – the only difference is that they show up in other statistics – in homelessness statistics, social housing, and welfare claims.

Let’s have a look at where they are showing up.

First, they show up in the benefit system.

Between April 2022 and February 2026 the number of people who claimed Universal Credit who were either refugees or on other humanitarian schemes rose from 67,000 to 182,000.

This is not a complete measure of how many people claiming originally came seeking asylum, as those accepted as refugees can later claim naturalisation, at which point they appear in the statistics as UK nationals.

UC accounts for about half of all working age benefit spending, so there will also be people claiming other benefits as well as Universal Credit.

People leaving Home Office accommodation also show up at the door of local councils, presenting as homeless. If local authorities accept them as homeless they are then under a statutory duty to house them.

In 2018/19 there were 3,340 people accepted by councils as homeless (and in need of housing) because they had had to leave Home Office accommodation. By 2025 that had risen more than sixfold, to 21,400. These people will be competing for social housing and temporary housing with other homeless people. These are not the only migrants presenting as homeless, just those who have recently left Home Office accommodation.

In due course with a lag they will also show up in statistics on who is getting social housing. Even in the last four years over 100,000 council houses have gone to non-UK nationals. These are not the people born abroad - only those who are not UK nationals at the point they get their tenancy. Ongoing high numbers of asylum claims are likely to put upward pressure on social housing over the coming years.

Conclusion

The UK government has so far refused to put a figure on the lifetime cost to the taxpayer of accepting an asylum seeker. The Migration Advisory Committee are supposed to be producing some work on this, but we will have to see how cooperative the government are about that.

In the meantime we have to rely on work in other countries. A University of Amsterdam study estimates the net lifetime cost of an asylum immigrant at around £400,000. So if you have 50,000-100,000 people arriving a year you are talking about commitments of £20-40 billion a year. This is serious money (for context £20bn is what we spend on the police in England and Wales).

And there are other costs too. If people arrive illegally with no screening they may be dangerous. I wrote just the other day about the high price we are paying in violent crime.

Ultimately the government needs to stop trying to move the deckchairs around.

We have to stop the flow.

Our ‘Borders Plan’, sets out the changes needed to fix this. This means leaving the ECHR and ECAT, repealing the Human Rights Act, and introducing a total ban on asylum claims for illegal entrants. Until we do these things, the costs are only going to grow.

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Is there a trend, or is it just being reported more? Or am I just imagining this spike?

The government has made it very hard to answer these questions, because it systematically refuses to publish statistics on crime and migration. One of the most frustrating things is that often the data is collected and then nothing is done with it.

I came across a yet another example of this recently. I asked the Department for Transport (DFT) for the number of road traffic incidents where the driver had a non-UK licence. I know they collect this data, because police fill it in on a form. But when I asked for the data they said they don’t collate it:

The Department does not hold data on whether drivers involved in collisions held a GB or non-GB driving licence. Whilst the non-GB licence field is on the National Collision Reporting Form, it is not designated as a statistical field and is therefore not routinely extracted or supplied to the Department for national statistical purposes.

DFT’s lack of interest in their own data is not unique. In fact it’s the norm at every stage of the criminal justice system:

• Arrests. Data on arrests by nationality and immigration status (e.g. were they here illegally, an asylum seeker, on ILR, or a British Citizen) are not centrally collected. This is despite the fact that many forces do collect the data in one way or another. Using FOI, the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) have managed to get answers out of some forces. Of the 44 police forces, 39 responded to FOI requests, showing a total of 163,009 arrests of foreign nationals. For example, of the 9,771 arrests carried out by British Transport Police officers in the year 2024/2025, 3,688 (37.7%) of these were foreign nationals.

• Prosecutions. The MOJ doesn’t publish data on prosecutions or convictions by nationality or immigration status. Again, this refusal to publish the data is despite the fact that it is being collected. Again the CMC have managed to get some of it via FOI. They found there had been 104,000 convictions of non-UK nationals between 2021 and 2023.

• Prisoners. The MOJ does publish a breakdown of prisoners by nationality. But they won’t provide a breakdown by immigration status - so you can’t find out how many of them were in the UK illegally when they offended, or whether they were asylum seekers or on a visa or ILR.

I take my hat off to think tanks like the CMC for their work to dig out data on this - but as they point out themselves, the data forced out via FOI requests is either old or patchy or inconsistent with lots of under-reporting, and it often lacks detailed breakdowns.

And I don’t think country of birth is published for any of this data - so if you have moved here and got citizenship you will show up as a UK national in the FOI data above. Even back in 2021 there were 4.3m people in England and Wales born abroad who had British passports, and another half a million got citizenship since then, so the all-in, long-run impact of migration is understated in the data.

The Home Office and MOJ could and should be producing timely, high-quality consistent data on migration and crime which would allow us to really understand the trends.

What little hard data we do have on migration and crime seems to chime with everything else we know about migration: it suggests that far from being homogenous there are massive differences in crime rates between different migrant groups. These differences should be properly understood and feeding in to policy. Instead they are just being ignored.

What’s going on?

This lack of transparency undermines public trust - particularly as there have just been an awful lot of high profile cases recently.

Here is what I can find with just a basic newspaper trawl - 60 high profile offences in just six months. (One thing I’m also struck by is how some news outlets tend not to mention offenders’ nationality, despite public interest.)

• 12^th May - Bawan Harwe, an Iraqi national, and Sharam Muhamadi, an Iranian national, appeared in court on trial for 21 alleged sexual offences, including rape, grooming and false imprisonment, of seven girls as young as 12 in Barnsley. (GB News). The BBC report fails to mention their nationality.

• 10^th May - Najeebullah Arab, an Afghan national, pleaded guilty to sexual communication with a child. Arab had previously pleaded guilty to the sexual assault, rape and kidnapping of two victims in separate incidents in January 2026. (Oxford Mail). The BBC report of the earlier offence on the 13^th March failed to mention his nationality.

• 9^th May - Abdoela Berhan, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, found guilty of assault after knocking a young woman unconscious and breaking her nose after she and her friends rejected his advances. The assault took place just a week after he was convicted of attacking a Subway worker in another incident. Berhan is currently on the run, after failing to show up for either of his cases. (Bournemouth Echo)

• 7^th May - Wahidullah Hotak, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for raping a woman in Wednesbury after she came into a shop asking to use the toilet. The court heard that Hotak had had his asylum claim rejected but was intending to appeal the decision. (Birmingham Mail)

• 5^th May – Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian refugee who arrived in 2023 and was granted permanent leave to remain under a family reunion scheme, appeared in court accused of raping and assaulting a 19-year-old woman on Bournemouth seafront. (The Telegraph)

• 5^th May - Hussein Almiyyahi, an Iraqi asylum seeker, jailed for four counts of sexual assault against three women, after a series of incidents as a nightclub in Oxford. The offence took place 9 months after Almiyyahi arrived in the UK. (Oxford Mail)

• 1^st May - Abdullah AlbadrI, A man born in Kuwait who had entered the UK illegally twice in four years, found guilty of preparing a terror-related knife attack after attempting to climb into the Israeli embassy in London. The attempted attack took place just 16 days after he arrived in the UK by small boat. (BBC News)

• 1^st May - Meron Habtu, an asylum seeker from Eritrea who entered the UK illegally in 2020, found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl on a train. The court heard that Habtu had lied about his age so he could live with a host family. (Daily Mail)

• 1^st May – Essa Suleiman, a Somalia national granted British citizenship, charged with attempted murder after attacking two Jewish men in Golders Green, and another man in the south of the city. It has been reported that Suleiman had previously been sentenced to 9 years in prison in 2008 for stabbing two police officers and a police dog. (BBC News)

• 30^th April - Gift Oladele, a Nigerian national, sentenced to 17 years for dragging a 19-year-old woman into woods and raping her. It emerged that he had been jailed in 2022 for a sexually motivated attack and had avoided deportation on human rights grounds. The judge at the immigration tribunal in 2024 said the fact that Oladele would be “a complete outsider should he relocate to Nigeria” and that he had a “developed private life having grown up in the United Kingdom” outweighed the public interest in deporting him. (BBC News)

• 30^th April - Shahram Rasouli, an asylum seeker from Iran, jailed for seven years after raping a 17-year-old girl at his Salvation Army-run accommodation in Denmark Hill, having plied her with alcohol. (The Telegraph)

• 28^th April - Yashin Himasara, a Sri-Lankan national living in an asylum hotel, appeared in court where he was accused of abducting and raping a 15-year-old girl before trying to flee the country with her. (Daily Mail)

• 28^th April - Hashmat Miakhel and Sayed Hoshmand, both Afghan nationals, appeared in court charged with the rape of a woman in Plymouth. (BBC News)

• 28^th April – Mohammed Shakavan, an Iraqi national, charged with the attempted rape of a child and sexual activity with a child. Greater Manchester Police said the charges relate to a report that a boy under the age of 16 was seriously sexually assaulted. (Manchester Evening News)

• 27^th April – Safi Dawood, an Afghan migrant who arrived by lorry in 2020 and was granted asylum, appeared in court admitting to stabbing his landlord and a 14-year-old boy. He also faces a charge of murdering dog-walker Wayne Broadhurst. (BBC News)

• 27^th April – Rawand Abdulrahman, an Iraqi asylum seeker, jailed for deliberately starting fires at two Essex hotels used to house asylum seekers, in an attempt to be moved elsewhere. (BBC News)

• 25^th April – A 14-year-old Iranian national, avoids jail despite being found guilty of raping a teenage classmate, and is sentenced to a rehabilitation order with a requirement to join specialist sessions on consent instead. The boy committed the offence within three months of entering the country as an unaccompanied child migrant on a small boat. (The Sun)

• 25^th April – Afsar Safi, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived by small boat, sentenced to two and a half years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a seven-year-old child at a government-funded hotel in Acton. The offender had previously stated in his asylum application that he had been with the Taliban since childhood. (Daily Express)

• 24^th April – Four Romanian nationals charged in connection with a rape of a teenage girl in Gravesend. Ionut Dobre, 33, and two boys 16, and 15, were charged with rape, while Benone Inofte, 46, been charged with aiding and abetting a rape. (BBC News)

• 23^rd April – Abdulla Ahmadi, an asylum seeker from Iran, and Ibrahim Alshafe and Karin Al-Danasurt, asylum seekers from Egypt, convicted of raping a highly intoxicated woman who had become separated from her friends on Brighton beach. During the trial, one of the men told the court that “rape to me is sex.” It also emerged that the same man had fled Egypt to avoid serving a lengthy sentence for murder for which he had already been convicted. The men were living at a Home Office hotel near Horsham at the time of the offence. (BBC News)

• 14^th April – Magistrates issued a warrant for the arrest of Thabani Maposa, a migrant staying at a hotel in Bournemouth, for the assault of a 14-year-old girl at a holiday park after offering whisky, cannabis and cocaine to her group of friends. The man failed to appear for his trial and was found guilty of assault in his absence. (The Telegraph)

• 9^th April – Mohammed Mirzai, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for sexually assaulting two different women on trains eight days apart. The week before, the same man had been sentenced to a separate 30-week jail term for crawling along the floor at Perth Leisure Pool to look up at a naked swimmer in a locked cubicle while on bail for the train offences. (BBC News)

• 9^th April – Thomas Mesai Siyoum, an Eritrean national who arrived by small boat in 2024, sentenced to three years and one month for a stabbing on the Oxford Brookes University campus. (Oxford Mail)

• 1^st April - Jitendrakumar Prajapati, an Uber Eats delivery driver, jailed for raping a customer hours after delivering food to her home in Boston. Prajapati told the victim he needed help getting a visa and a job. (BBC News). It has been reported elsewhere that the offender is an Indian national, but the BBC does not mention his nationality.

• 1^st April – Kamran Khan, a failed Pakistani asylum seeker, jailed for the grooming and repeated abuse of an eight-year-old girl. Khan was convicted of two counts of rape of a child, four counts of sexually assaulting a child and two counts of causing a child under thirteen to engage in sexual activity. (Daily Express)

• 1^st April - Sukirthan Thangrasha, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, jailed after being found guilty of indecent exposure. Thangrasha also pleaded guilty to two charges of assault against two members of staff at the hotel where he was being accommodated, as well as one count of using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour when he shouted a sexual profanity at a child in a cemetery in Portsmouth. (The Portsmouth News)

• 27^th March - Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. The man arrived in the UK four months before he raped the girl. (BBC News)

• 18^th March - Mohand Mageed, a Syrian refugee, jailed for attacking and raping a university student walking home from a 21st birthday party in Glasgow. Mageed had been granted leave to remain in the UK six months before his arrest and had been living at the city’s Alexander Thomson Hotel for the homeless at the time of the offence. (The Sun)

• 18^th March – Omar Moman, an Afghan national, charged with assault after allegedly attacking people with a metal bar after he was denied an appointment. Police said six people needed treatment in hospital after the attack. (The Telegraph)

• 15^th March - Mohammed Abdulraziq, a Sudanese migrant, jailed for the sexual assault of a five-year-old girl after snatching her from the street. Abdulraziq held his victim in his bedsit until the girl’s mother, who was desperately searching for her, heard her crying and she was rescued by two men who forced their way into the ground floor room. He had previously admitted charges of assault, attempted assault and criminal damage in relation to a separate incident. (The Telegraph)

• 9^th March - Yousif Al-Maliki, an Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived by small boat, found guilty of raping a woman he had just met while staying at the Astor Hostel in South Kensington. The man’s lawyers claimed that he had fled Iraq seeking refuge due to his bisexuality. (The Standard)

• 6^th March – Sohail Amiri, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived in the country by small boat, jailed for sexual offences against three lone women in the street. (BBC News)

• 4^th March – Mustafa Kokoneh, a Libyan national, charged with attempting to murder two people and assaulting two others during an incident in Edinburgh. Kokoneh arrived in the UK in 2019 and was granted citizenship four years later. (BBC News)

• 4^th March – Saif Rahman and Ibrahim Zarifkhel, both listed as staying at an Edinburgh hotel where migrants have been housed, charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl at the National Gallery of Scotland. (The Sun)

• 27^th February – Musafar Hotak, a migrant from Afghanistan, jailed for the rape of a “vulnerable intoxicated” woman in Southampton. (The Telegraph)

• 26^th February – Shafiullah Rasooli, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for three counts of sexual assault, against two women. Rasooli was illegally using his friend’s registration details to deliver food to customers, and assaulted the women on their doorstep. (The Telegraph)

• 25^th February – Hassan Mohamud and Abdrihman Abdihakim Ali, both Somali nationals, and Rotimi Adeyemo a Nigerian national, charged with jointly raping a woman in Belfast. (Belfast Live)

• 16^th February - Jowad Haji, an Iraqi national, charged with raping a woman in a shop in Stratford Upon Avon. A woman is alleged to have been raped, suffered an attempted rape, a sexual assault and suffered ‘intentional strangulation’ in the incident. (Birmingham Mail)

• 11^th February - Shahram Ibrehemi, an Iranian asylum seeker, jailed for repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl while another man kept watch, after luring her back to a hotel room in Hull. (The Sun)

• 5^th February – Ahmadreza Khalafi, an Iranian refugee, jailed after sexually assaulting a teenager who was playing hide and seek with her friends on a night out in Bishop Stortford. (Daily Express)

• 2^nd February – Eid Anwar Fathi Najjar, a failed asylum seeker from Egypt, jailed for raping and sexually assaulting a woman he lured from a nightclub. The preliminary hearing was told that Najjar had entered the country illegally in a small boat in 2022, but although his asylum claim had been refused, the Immigration Services told him there was no plan to remove him from the country at that time. (BBC News)

• 30^th January – Deng Chol Majek, an asylum seeker from Sudan, jailed for life after murdering a woman who worked at the hotel at which he was staying. Deng Majek stabbed Rhiannon Whyte 23 times with a screwdriver in a frenzied 90-second attack after following the 27-year-old to Bescot Stadium railway station in Walsall. (BBC News)

• 26th January – Sheraz Malik, an asylum seeker born in Pakistan, found guilty of two counts of raping an 18-year-old woman in a park in Nottinghamshire. The woman had already been taken to an isolated area and raped by another man he was with, who has yet to be identified. The offence took place the year before last, but it was not until January of this year that it was legal to report that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. Nottingham Crown Court had seen fit to place a reporting restriction on this crucial fact, with the defendant referred to in the press simply as a ‘man’.

• 21^st January – Melaku Gebresembet, an Ethiopian national, charged with sexual assault of a staff member at a Southampton hotel used to house asylum seekers. (Sky News)

• 13^th January - Sultani Bakatash, an Afghan national, appeared in court accused of raping two 14-year-old girls. Bakatash has been in the UK for two years and has been granted indefinite leave to remain, with his mother, two brothers and two sisters. (BBC News)

• 12^th January – Mehmet Ogur, a Kurdish asylum seeker from Turkey, jailed for raping an 18-year-old woman in a park after meeting her via a social media app. He was living at the Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth, at the time. (BBC News)

• 9^th January - Muqbil Al Dhaheri, a Yemeni asylum seeker, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a medical worker while receiving treatment at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, as well as committing an act of public indecency, by urinating publicly during his return journey to the Wethersfield Immigration Centre where he was being housed. Al Dhaheri arrived in the UK four months before the incident. (GB News)

• 2^nd January – Abid Sherzad, an Afghan migrant, convicted of sexual assaulting a woman who fell asleep while eating pizza after a night out near London Bridge station. Sherzad arrived in the UK nine months before the attack and was staying in a taxpayer funded hotel in Oxford. (The Sun)

• 23^rd December – Rapualla Ahmadze, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for the rape of a teenage girl in a park in Elgin, Moray. Ahmadze was also convicted on a separate charge of threatening and abusive behaviour towards the same victim. (BBC News)

• 19^th December - Amer Mohammed, an Eritrean asylum seeker, jailed for a violent sexual assault on a woman walking alone along Margate seafront. (GB News)

• 16^th December – Nasratullah Wahidi, an Afghan migrant, jailed for assault of a family of five at a migrant camp, following an argument over a football. Wahidi pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent to the 16-year-old boy, intentional strangulation of the 15-year-old boy and the mother, and common assault against the 13-year-old boy and father. (The Telegraph)

• 15^th December – Abdulla Ali, an asylum seeker from Egypt, jailed for sexual assault after he performed a sex act on a woman who had collapsed after a night out in Gloucester. (Gloucestershire Police)

• 15^th December - Abdulmawal Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese migrant, sentenced for attempting to kidnap a teenage girl in Swindon town centre. Footage from the scene shows him attempting to drag his victim across the road, before he was chased off by passengers in a passing bus. (The Telegraph). The BBC report on the 12^th Dec fails to mention his nationality.

• 9^th December - Hawre Mohamed, an asylum seeker from Iraq, jailed for sexually assaulting a woman, after following her onto a train. The offence happened three months after he entered the UK via small boat. (The Telegraph) (BBC News). The BBC report fails to mention his nationality, or the fact that he arrived via small boat.

• 11^th December – Chret Callender, a failed asylum seeker from Trinidad, found guilty of raping a woman in her own home. The offence took place while Callender was appealing the rejection of his asylum application, which he submitted after arriving on a visa. The man was being housed in a hotel by the Home Office at the time. (The Times)

• 8^th December – Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, teenage asylum seekers from Afghanistan, given custodial sentences for the abduction and rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. (BBC News). Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted.

• 6^th December – Adam Ahmed, a Sudanese migrant, convicted of attempted murder this month after stabbing two of his neighbours, following a row over loud music. A court heard he had not shown a “trace of emotion” when he attacked one of them by driving a knife into the side of their neck. (The Sun)

• 5^th December – Muhammad Sheikhi, an asylum seeker staying in a hotel in Falkirk, appeared in court after being charged with two sexual assaults. An asylum seeker from Afghanistan staying in the same hotel had been jailed five months earlier for the rape of a 15-year-old girl. (The Telegraph)

• 14^th November - Abdolrahman Banafsha, an asylum seeker from Iran, sentenced for sexually assaulting a teenage student whilst walking home from a night out. Banafsha arrived in the UK by small boat five months before the offence took place. (Bristol Live)

• 14^th November - Mohammed Fathi Eltbie, a failed asylum seeker from Egypt, charged with raping a woman in a wooded area in Bournemouth. Eltbie’s asylum application had been refused 10 months before. (BBC News)

• 13^th November – Amin Abedi Mofrad, an Iranian asylum seeker who had been staying at an asylum hotel, jailed for the rape of a 15-year-old-girl near Oxford’s Westgate shopping centre. (BBC News)

Conclusion

We have borders and immigration laws for a reason. They are designed to keep dangerous individuals out of the country and remove those who have demonstrated themselves to be dangerous.

The public are not wrong to be angry about crimes committed by people who have abused this country’s hospitality. The snapshot above - from just a short period - shows how the system is failing.

Maximum transparency would be our first move - publishing all the data across the criminal justice system, the tribunals system and beyond. But that can only be the first step towards restoring trust.

The bottom line is that there are too many people being allowed to stay in our country who pose a risk to the public. Our ‘Borders Plan’, sets out the changes needed to fix this. This means leaving the ECHR and ECAT, repealing the Human Rights Act, and introducing a total ban on asylum claims for illegal entrants. Until we do these things, the list of horrors above - and public anger - are only going to grow.

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-Clinton advisor James Carville, (Wall Street Journal, 25 February 1993)

“The markets will have to fall into line”

-Paula Barker MP (City Am, 12 May 2026)

“The yields on ten-year gilts gained 18 basis points on Friday, hitting 5.18 per cent, the highest level since 2008. The yield on 30-year bonds, which are more sensitive to political uncertainty, gained 19 basis points to 5.85 per cent, the highest level this century.”

-The Times, 15 May 2026

* * * * * * *

It’s costing the British government more to borrow money. Because government is paying a lot of debt interest, that means either less to spend on other things, or higher taxes for you.

The cost of borrowing rose across the world during 2022, and the era of really cheap borrowing for governments ended worldwide. You can see the UK-specific spike caused by Liz Truss’s catastrophic “mini-Budget”, and see how it then fell back under Rishi and Hunt.

Alarmingly, you can also see how borrowing costs for the UK have started to diverge up and away from the pack of similar countries since autumn 2024. And how that divergence seems to be getting bigger:

Higher borrowing costs1 mean that servicing our national debt takes up a larger chunk of public spending, and a larger chunk of GDP.

Here’s how much we spent on debt interest over time as a share of GDP. The cost fell back in the late 80s, again in the late 90s, and again during the 2010s. But now the falling trend has reversed.

We have gone from a bit under 2% of GDP to a bit under 4%. Even just that extra 2% GDP is a huge amount of money - about £65 billion a year. And for reasons I will get into below, I think even that gloomy forecast may be too optimistic.

What does the 4% GDP we are going to be spending on servicing debt cost you?

For example, if we were not spending this money on debt interest we could abolish all of the following: inheritance tax, business rates, capital gains tax, stamp duty on shares, stamp duty on houses, and fuel duty - and we’d still have money left over2.

The cost of the cost of borrowing

Obviously, we can’t just magic away the national debt. But even small differences to fiscal credibility - and therefore borrowing costs - make a big difference to taxpayers.

The OBR’s “Ready Reckoner” is that a 1% difference in gilt rates up or down changes spending by just under £10 billion a year by the end of the forecast.

As a bit of fun, here are the (very rough) sorts of magnitudes of things you could do if Britain had the same (lower) borrowing costs as some of our peers:

• Same as the US. Even if we just closed the borrowing costs gap that has opened up between Britain and the US since 2024, that would be worth a lot. £5bn a year would let you raise the threshold for Inheritance Tax by about £150,000 - so from £325,000 to £475,000 or so, which would take a lot of people out of the tax altogether.

• Same as France and Canada. If we could close the borrowing costs gap with places like France and Canada that’s about £10-15 bn a year. For context we spend about £20 billion a year on the police in England and Wales so we could have more than 50% more police if we could get borrowing rates down to French or Canadian levels.

• Same as Germany. If you could get down to German rates that would mean £20 billion a year more to spend. With that we could cut the basic and higher rates of income tax by 2p, and give nearly 40 million people a meaningful tax cut.

How not to do it

One thing that pushes up gilt rates is fears of inflation - and Labour have stoked price rises with inflation-pushing pay increases in the public sector, Ed Miliband’s mad energy policies, and the disastrous Employment Bill.

But the main thing that drives borrowing rates, other things equal, are perceptions about whether a country has spending and borrowing under control.

Under Reeves we are borrowing a lot more. Under the plans of the last Conservative government, we would have borrowed £323 billion over five years. Reeves is instead borrowing 80% more - £583 billion.

And even her plans for “deficit” reduction in the future turn on totally unspecified large spending cuts just before the next election.

Unsurprisingly, the IFS and OBR have been sceptical about this “plan”, and markets clearly share their scepticism.

And things are only going to get harder in future, as one of the main sectors buying gilts - the old DB pension schemes - is shrinking.

Right now markets are super jittery given world events. So what we really need to not do is stand out from the crowd as a risky place to put your money.

But we have a government that seems to be spending more and more, looks unstable and like it is about to embark on more reckless left-wing policies.

Recent rises in rates are directly attributable to the ongoing Labour leadership crisis:

• Andy Burnham – the current favourite to replace Starmer – has criticised the government for being “in hock to the bond markets”, and to fund government spending “outside of the rules”.

• Louise Haigh, an influential former cabinet minister, suggested weakening “the debt targets from the current three and five year rolling windows to a longer horizon of ten years”

• Other Burnham outriders have variously suggested that bond markets will have to “fall in line”, or that “the British Parliament can’t be run at the behest of the bond markets”.

Whatever euphemisms or technical jargon politicians might prefer to use, this basically all means one thing: more borrowing.

In case you think I’m over-interpreting it, investors are openly saying this is what they are worried about.

Take this recent FT article:

UK borrowing costs hit their highest level since 2008 on Friday as traders priced in a greater likelihood that Andy Burnham would challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership […]

the UK was the worst-performing major bond market, which investors and analysts attributed to the growing political risks. “As an investor, my strategy is already [to be] short UK bonds and very short the pound,” said Adrian Owens, CIO for the Global Rates strategy at hedge fund group Investcorp-Tages. “On a Rayner or Burnham victory, we will be adding to both..” […]

“[The] market’s fear is that Burnham would be more left-leaning, and we could see [a] further increase in deficits,” said Mohit Kumar of Jefferies, who added that the bank was expecting this to weigh on sterling and longer-term UK government bonds.

And to compete in that leadership contest, we already have Starmer promising massive increases in spending, seemingly without any offsetting savings.

People always focus on the most extreme scenario: a fiscal crisis, in which ministers can’t control public spending, meaning they borrow more. Markets then lose faith in ministers and borrowing becomes more expensive, causing yet more spending in a positive feedback loop that ends with a visit from the IMF.

While we should never lose sight of this risk, a different risk is much more likely: the risk that we end up in a stagnant equilibrium with interest rates much higher than we should have, meaning taxpayer money is burned on unnecessary interest payments, meaning we end up with higher tax and lower productive investment, meaning lower growth, making it harder to serve our debt, keeping interest rates up and living standards down.

Conclusion: Money’s too tight to (not) mention

These growing risks, on top of the other economic problems that are piling up, are one reason why the Conservatives have set out a “Golden Rule” - that we will put half of all the savings we identify towards deficit reduction, rather than pledges to cut tax or spend money.

So at least half of the £47 billion of savings we set out last year would go towards deficit reduction. We are the only party making a clear, funded pledge to cut the deficit.

This is very unusual for an opposition at this point in the cycle - but we have just got to start talking about the deficit and debt again.

It’s boring, and in the era of dopamine-and-emotion-driven viral social media it is harder than ever to get people to focus on these boring-but-vital issues. The deficit never screamed at someone on TV, or went crazy in the street.

And yet, despite being boring, we have to focus on the deficit. Even the left-leaning Resolution Foundation published a report the other day which stated:

“The incoming Labour Government insisted it could transform growth and public services without reaching for “the tax lever”. In the event that lever was yanked, and yanked hard. Since the election the government has borrowed more, spent more and taxed more”

No kidding:

This mix of higher tax and higher borrowing is causing our borrowing costs to diverge upwards and away from our peers. That will have significant costs for taxpayers.

And that’s under Reeves and Starmer. Now we are about to embark on a Labour leadership race which is likely to be an auction of left-wing promises to spend more, with several of the contestants openly scornful of the idea that borrowing really matters.

As the opposition, we are trying to take the conversation in a very different direction.

But I have a bad feeling that under Labour we are going to learn the hard way that you can’t tell people you want to borrow from to just fall into line.

I fear things will get worse before they get better.

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Most teachers manage their way through the minefield of teaching contested issues. But there are too many examples where things are going wrong. Let’s run through some.

Here’s a social media post from Blue Coat School, Coventry. The school is clearly taking sides in a party political issue. Apparently the law doesn’t align with their “school values”.

We are told that the “students feel” this is a bad piece of legislation - as if the teachers have played no role in arranging this stunt.

Imagine a school posting a picture of pupils protesting about the Starmer government’s handling of the small boats crisis. “Enough is enough, say pupils in Year 9 - Britain’s generosity is being exploited”. People would go berserk.

Another example: a visit by a Jewish MP to a school in their constituency was cancelled, after a demo by pro-Palestinian campaigners. Damien Egan was set to visit Bristol Brunel Academy in September, but the school became aware that protests were planned by members of staff and the National Education Union (NEU).

The Bristol branch of the NEU said the cancellation of the visit by Egan, who is vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel, was “a win for safeguarding, solidarity, and for the power of the NEU trade union staff group, parents, and campaigners standing together.” They said the cancellation was “a clear message” that politicians who support Israel’s actions in Gaza “are not welcome in our schools”.

This issue came to the surface again when extraordinary footage emerged of pupils at Connaught School for Girls in Waltham Forest confronting their striking teachers. The SWP-backed teachers are bedecked with Palestine flags and keffiyeh. The children would just like them to get back to work, and hold up signs saying things like TEACH THEM NOT PALESTINE”, “LET US LEARN”, and “NICE DAY FOR A STRIKE? NOT REALLY”). The last I thought particularly charming. They really are being more grown up than the teachers.

The problem is often just that pupils are only given one side of the story. Here are pupils from Preston Muslim Girls High School (a state school). The school had them making Palestine flags to give to the local council and painting flags on their faces. Are they really getting both sides of the story here? Well, the “artists” they are working with in the examples below are on the extreme left - part of “Your Party” and standing for election on the basis of “Gaza Genocide”. So probably not.

Another example: at St Dunstan’s Primary, teachers got their children to support the “lift the ban” campaign to let asylum seekers work.

The reason governments (of all colours) have not done this is because it would act as a powerful pull factor, and attract more economic migrants to come and pose as asylum seekers. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but it is not “political neutrality” for the school to be pushing a policy which is off to the left of the Labour party.

What and how

Bias takes the form of both what is and isn’t discussed, and also how it is taught.

James Esses points out examples of both.

What is and isn’t covered. Take Northgate High School. Classrooms filled with ‘refugee’ and ‘pride’ displays. These include: ‘Norfolk Welcomes Refugees’, ‘LGBTQ Reads’, and flags representing various gender identities. The favoured causes of the left are well covered here - but the overall effect is one sided. This is common.

How it is taught. As part of ‘iGen Day’ (identity generation) at Honley High School, (near where I grew up) 14 year olds were set an exercise on ‘hate crimes’. They were asked: “Why do you think that the amount of hate crimes increased after the election of Donald Trump?” and a battery of similarly one-sided questions. I hold no brief for Trump at all, but this isn’t neutral.

Or take St Barnabas Primary School, where they are still using the terrible left-wing “boxes and fences” picture to try and teach Year 1 kids about equity and fairness - a totally slanted introduction to these issues.

Protest

There have been too many examples of where schools have either released pupils from school to go to political protests - or organised them to go.

The issue hit the headlines during the 2023 Gaza protests - there were kids in school uniform at the protests.

But climate is another area where some schools have found it hard to distinguish between the uncontentious and the political. There was a rash of climate protests in 2019 in the run up to the General Election. In fact, in my constituency in Market Harborough, there were several.

During one of them, one of the primary schools walked children round to the protest in the middle of the day to have a picture with Extinction Rebellion banners. Secondary school children came along too - one of the schools even produced a banner with their logo on. This is not political neutrality.

Campaigners present these things as being spontaneously “organised by the children” but in reality eight year-olds do not “spontaneously organise” themselves to go on protests during the school day, and the kids are regurgitating what they have been told by teachers.

Not neutral on culture

Too many schools also practice asymmetric multiculturalism. Bilton School held a “culture day” dedicated to “recognising and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community”. They told parents: “We encourage students to consider wearing attire that reflects their nationality or family heritage”.

But after a 12 year-old girl turned up in a Union Jack dress and said she wanted to talk about being British, the school sent her home early. The school later offer offered "unreserved apologies."

“Culture day” is a disastrous, balkanising concept which should be stamped out.

Norwood Primary School in Eastleigh scrapped its annual Easter celebration and service to “respect diverse religious beliefs”. The head teacher told parents that: “By not holding specific religious celebrations, we aim to create a more inclusive atmosphere that honours and respects the beliefs of all our children and their families”.

“We understand that this change may be disappointing for some, especially those who have cherished these traditions over the years. However, we believe that this decision aligns with our values of inclusivity and respect for diversity.”

She added, however, that the school would celebrate Refugee Week in June, as the school works towards becoming a “School of Sanctuary”.

Schools of Sanctuary is a political pro-immigration campaign - more than 1,000 schools have signed up to make children into what it calls “ethically informed change-makers”. Joining such a campaign is a clear violation of the 1996 Act.

There has been controversy recently about advice to local schools from Calderdale Council, and in particular their guidance that a school should not ask “its students” (not even just Muslim students) to draw Jesus or Mohammed:

Not neutral on trans and gender

I’m not going to repeat it all here - but I wrote about these issues before and too many schools are way, way, off being neutral.

Why things go wrong

Let’s now turn on to why these failures of neutrality happen. I think there are three main reasons: failure to train the workforce, campaigners pushing against neutrality, and a lack of mechanisms to enforce neutrality.

a) Managing your own biases is something you have to learn

First, the teaching workforce is quite left wing - only 7% voted Conservative or Reform at the last election, less than a fifth as many as the general public. Since the election teachers have become disappointed by Labour, but even back in December (long before their recent surge) the Green Party was the top choice among teachers.

A recent poll by Arch 10 found that people in education (across schools and universities) were much less likely to think Britain’s role in the world has been positive than the general public, and (in contrast with the public) they on balance agree rather than disagree that “symbols of patriotism can be offensive and should not be promoted in public institutions.”

People can set aside their personal politics. But most people do not naturally understand how to present things in a truly neutral way. We all constantly apply our own biases to everything. To present political and social issues in a neutral way requires great skill and much greater knowledge than most people have.

So when a complete non-specialist (say a physics teacher) finds themselves teaching PHSE or civics, or doing an assembly on trans, or conflict or whatever, there is every chance they will fail to do this neutrally.

One factor compounding the problem is the incorrect belief of much of the contemporary left that their political views are in fact “not politics, just kindness and politeness”.

Many new teachers (at school in the 2010s, at university after 2020) will never have been in a milieu in which there are multiple views on immigration or trans. The views of the left on these issues are in the minority nationally, but there is no reason young teachers will automatically understand that there even is another view. And at present they are not taught how to be neutral.

B) There are a lot of people pushing for a less neutral approach

There are plenty of people who want to push schools away from being neutral - campaigners who argue that the school system should be explicitly aimed at promoting one or more strands of ‘social justice’, and encouraging changes to that end.

The main teacher union, the NEU, is aggressively left wing and is led by the ultra left. NEU Leader Daniel Kebede said at a Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism conference (!) that teacher strikes were about “taking back control of an education system from a brutally racist state”. Teachers have been told by the NEU that they need to bring the “Palestine Struggle” into schools.

Another example is the Runnymede Trust, which exerts considerable influence in schools and in teacher training through its ‘Lit in Colour’ joint initiative with Penguin Books to diversify the English Literature curriculum and spend much more class time discussing race and racism, (and now also through a partnership with Penguin and AQA to make English Literature GCSEs and A levels more “inclusive”.)

The Runnymede response to the recent Curriculum & Assessment Review stated that “we are concerned that the report does not address the urgent need to develop anti-racist literacy in schools” and “we remain committed to focusing on education as a key site through which we [Runnymede] progress racial justice”.

As I noted in my earlier piece on sex education, there are numerous activist campaign groups trying to push sex and gender education in a direction away from what most parents would regard as neutral or even acceptable.

Even the government believes that schools should be vehicles for social justice, rather than politically neutral places. The government’s recent “Curriculum and Assessment Review” has a section headed “a commitment to social justice” describing how it has applied a social justice ‘lens’. This is unsurprising as it was chaired by Professor Becky Francis, all of whose published work has been in the field of “social justice” in education.

Following the review, the government is re-writing the national curriculum. Working groups have submitted their proposals for each subject, it will be published in spring 2027, and then be taught from September 2028.

The government’s response says, amongst other things, that: “we will look for the earliest opportunity to make citizenship a new statutory requirement for key stages 1 and 2”.

So primary teachers will be spending less time on the three Rs, and more time on potentially contentious social issues. Without action, this is likely to increase the risk of politicised or biased content.

c) The lack of a mechanisms to enforce neutrality

None of these issues are new. The first high profile case was that of William Tyndale Primary School in Islington in the early 1970s, where “progressive” leaders showed indifference to parents’ interests even as their school broke down. This case contributed to Callaghan’s “Secret Garden” speech in 1976, which asserted the legitimacy of some control of an activity absorbing such a large slice of the national budget.

Despite this long history, impartiality has made too little progress. It is not mentioned at all in the initial teacher education standards: there is no expectation that trainee teachers should be taught what impartiality should mean in their professional context, and where the challenges are likely to arise.

The political neutrality requirements of the 1996 Education Act were not followed up by action or the creation of any enforcement mechanism because of the result of the election the next year. So the law just sits there, with no clear mechanism for its enforcement.

Guidance set out in 2022 was good - but doesn’t seem to have percolated into the consciousness of schools. Unless there is proper enforcement of the law, many (busy) schools and teachers will focus elsewhere.

Getting back to neutrality: how to do it

So… there are lots of things we need to do to unwind all this mess.

Here are some starters for ten:

• Teacher training should include political neutrality - teachers need to know both what neutrality is, and how to deliver it. We need to recognise that this is something that needs to be taught, not simply required.

• The 1996 Act needs enforcement mechanisms. The political neutrality requirements of the 1996 Education Act come with no enforcement mechanism for the DFE, either for trusts, schools or individual teachers. That means the law is not enforced - which means no-one ever learns any lessons.

• Ofsted needs an explicit remit (and resourcing) to consider the issue at inspection. At present Ofsted has little chance of detecting curriculum matters that a school wishes to conceal, let alone more subtle impartiality failures. There is also no time or space for difficult conversations of the kind that can help school leaders understand that they have wrongly strayed into political partiality, even if with good intentions.

• The regulatory frameworks for teachers need to include greater requirements for political neutrality. At the moment the Secretary of State can only refer teachers to the Teaching Regulation Agency on the basis of a referral, and it is not clear how the TRA would make judgements even if teachers were referred over political bias.

• Teachers need a really clear set of examples of what is not neutral, and things they must not do. We’re not in search of perfection here. But too many schools just have no idea where the line is, and find themselves way on the wrong side of it. The 2022 guidance will need updating, but ultimately enforcing of the law and communicating it when you do is what will provide examples to teachers and schools of what isn’t acceptable. We should be clear that joining a campaign like “schools of sanctuary” is a breach of the law.

• The Public Sector Equality Duty created a wide channel for the politicisation of schools under the guise of ‘promoting respect for protected characteristics’ - aided also by organisations such as Stonewall advising that it was good practice to ‘go beyond the law’. We need to undo this, and schools should also be explicitly precluded from ‘going beyond the law’ on contested matters.

• The Equality Act “positive action” provisions have so diminished the long-standing principle that the law should treat all citizens equally, that many in schools feel they can or even must favour minorities. As Kemi Badenoch has argued, the principle of equality before the law needs to be strongly reasserted, and the Equality Act needs a total overhaul - we can keep sensible things like the elements from the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, but much of what Labour added needs to be deleted.

• Parents and children of British-born children and immigrants need to hear positives about Britain and about the future: a narrative about the past that gives credit for all that is good as well as a proportionate assessment of mistakes and wrongs. Telling children that they are part of a systematically oppressed minority, whose life chances were largely removed even before they were born is self-defeating. It encourages victimhood, grievance - and, perversely, a sense of powerlessness and second-class status. This is particularly sad given that Britain has a fairly strong record here compared with many other countries…

• We will likely need to overhaul parts of the curriculum, change specifications etc. Until we see the curriculum consultation drafts that are due to be published come out we won’t know exactly what will need to change, but there are lots of reasons to be concerned about the current government’s direction of travel.

I’m sure there are more - but what do you think?

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The increase in our borrowing costs in the last month is a lot higher than in other developed countries.

The markets can see that Reeves’s forecasts are held together with a bunch of increasingly implausible assumptions.

For example, at Autumn Budget she inserted a random assumption that she will find £9 billion of totally unspecified “efficiency savings” over the last two years of the forecast. As the IFS noted drily: “governments have a clear tendency to promise future cuts which they don’t go on to deliver.”

The OBR produced a list of some of the other risks - for example, that a record tax-raising parliament might dampen growth more than she expects, and bring in less. They also noted risks “from industrial action in the NHS” and the plausibility of “the achievement of planned reductions in asylum accommodation costs by the Home Office”. That already looks very shaky.

The OBR noted that “A further risk is the future costs of welfare spending following the sharp growth of disability and health caseloads since the pandemic.” I have written about that before - given the government has been defeated by Labour backbenchers, they have no way to control welfare spending.

But one of the less well known bits of sellotape and string that are (just about) holding together Rachel Reeves’ fiscal forecasts together are some really optimistic forecasts for receipts from taxes on assets, based on a mix of tax increases and rosy assumptions about ever-rising asset prices.

But what if those rosy assumptions don’t work out?

Shaky foundations

I have been mulling this for a while - and was reminded of the risk the other day by a story in the FT saying that house prices in central London were falling fast:

Prices are particularly down in the centre of the city:

Obviously, other things equal lower house prices would be good news for someone who wants to buy or rent.

But of course other things aren’t equal - and the outflow is being driven by problems with our economy and the fact that international investors are running for the hills:

You might not be sympathetic to investors - but falling asset prices might have a bad consequence for the public finances too, where the numbers are flattered by assumptions that asset taxes will yield lots of money. (This assumption is one reason the Conservatives’ plan to abolish stamp duty on the primary residence is not cheap.) Together Reeves hopes to have increased her takings from these taxes by over £35 billion by 2030.

Life’s a (fiscal) drag

At Spring Statement Reeves got a £5bn windfall from assumptions about CGT increasing, which helped offset some of the extra spending she has announced since the Autumn.

Some of the growth is from Reeves’ own tax increases (like the family farm tax and family business tax) - and some from an assumption that the assets she is taxing will keep on going up, while frozen thresholds for IHT and stamp duty drag more and more into paying. (This is “fiscal drag.”)

That’s why Reeves will be keeping her fingers crossed for increases in asset prices - if anything happens to them her numbers will start to unravel in a big way. This is a kind of “fiscal fragility”.

This isn’t just inflation - these taxes are also increasing as a share of GDP. Stamp duties have long been about 0.5% of GDP, but are going up about half that again to 0.77%. Having been in a range of 0.15 to 0.25% GDP over recent decades inheritance tax is forecast to increase to 0.40%1. The three taxes taken together will have gone up by about three quarters of a percent of GDP from 2024 to 2030/312.

What happens when the go-getters get up and go?

But the big caveat to all these rosy forecasts is that they rest so heavily on asset prices going up and up. If there are any big changes to asset prices Reeves will have yet another headache.

What might do that? I don’t know, we could have big tax rises that make investors leave, followed by a war in the Middle East?

It doesn’t take many people moving to blow a hole in these rosy forecasts, because these are highly concentrated taxes.

Take inheritance tax. It is a very geographically concentrated tax. I have been frustrated for a while that the statistics on it are so poor, so I made an FOI request.

From it, here is the share of payers and revenues by parliamentary constituency3. Here’s the share of payers, which is concentrated in the south:

And the here’s the share of the tax raised - which is even more concentrated - particularly in London:

The map doesn’t really do it justice, so here is a chart where we line up all the constituencies from those that pay the least, to those that pay the most.

It isn’t just inheritance tax that is so concentrated - similar things can be said for CGT and property transaction tax revenues - they are highly concentrated on a relatively small number of large payers. And lots of these people are wondering if they want to stay in the UK with Reeves as Chancellor.

Conclusion

Sure, there are bigger problems for Reeves. As I noted at the top, even pre-Iran she had lots of implausible things baked into her forecasts.

So this is just another risk to add to a long list. Reeves will no doubt blame Iran in her next Budget - and it is indeed hitting the world economy. But it was Reeves who made a choice to run all these risks and cross her fingers - to set off on a 100 mile journey with exactly 100 miles worth of petrol.

Assuming she would face nothing but plain sailing was naive. And there’s something odd about building your plans on getting tens of billions more from large investor types and then doing everything you can to drive them away.

Maybe things on the asset taxes will still turn out fine. It just strikes me that the growing reliance on asset-based taxes is building another new fragility into our public finances. Let’s hope we don’t find out the hard way that this turns out to have been a mistake.

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Footnotes

I did warn that some of the data was about to change - and it has.

The Family Resources Survey (FRS) is kind of a big deal in government statistics. They ask a load of people very detailed questions about exactly how much money they have coming in from earnings, investments, benefits and so on. It is used to calculate many things - like measurements of relative poverty and the “distributional analysis” you see alongside the Budget, and so on.

The nice thing is that it links together information from many sources; income from work, every type of investment, every type of benefit, together with info on the household: whether they are carers or disabled, what sort of household it is and so on.

But for many years people have noted that when you add it all up, the amount people report receiving in benefits is smaller than the actual total the government is spending. People forget what they have received.

So the DWP have now started supplementing the survey data with some administrative data - they link up people’s survey replies to administrative records.

This is a work in progress. So far they have only thoroughly revised the data for the years after 2021/22, thought there are some changes to earlier years too.

The effect has been to halve, but not fully close, the gap between the money sent out and the income reported. According to DWP:

“At a United Kingdom level, the average survey undercount over the three years to 2024 is 18%, while the admin-linked percentage is 9%”

The gaps are different for different places and benefits. For example, under-reporting was particularly high in Northern Ireland. And some benefits are more under-reported than others:

More large claims

One thing that the new data does is shed new light on the phenomenon of really large welfare claims. DWP refuse to use their administrative data to answer questions about how many households are making large benefit claims, so the data from FRS is the best tool we have to look at this. Though a chunk of benefit spending is still missing, we can now get a more realistic sense of how many households are making really large welfare claims and the numbers are larger than previously reported.

The average full time worker earns about £39,800 a year, which is £32,200 after tax.

There are many working age households getting more than this in benefits. There are now:

• 819,000 households getting over £30,000 a year in benefits,

• 626,000 getting over £32,200 (so more than the average take home)

• 267,000 getting over £40,000,

• 91,000 getting over £50,000,

• 16,000 getting over £60,000.

The (revised) number getting over £30,000 in real terms is up by 7% since 2021/22 - and is up by a third compared to the figures before they were revised.

What do we know about these households?

In terms of where they are, a greater proportion of working age households have large claims in London and the North East, and lower in the Midlands, Wales and the East of England.

In terms of ethnicity, some groups are more likely to see large claims than others. Indian households of working age were the least likely to have large claims while Pakistani, Arab and Bangladeshi households were more likely - one in eight Bangladeshi households of working age claim over £30,000 in benefits, compared to less than one in 25 nationally.

The proportion of households making large claims is much higher among those in social housing - again, over one in eight. The big difference with private renters is slightly surprising - after all, households in social housing are already benefitting from a rent subsidy. The value of that non-cash subsidy is not captured in this data and in fact it should reduce any housing benefit income, which is measured here.

If we were to include the implicit value of their social housing the sums these households are receiving from taxpayers would be even larger.

Conclusion

I wrote before that the real-terms growth and scale of really large benefit claims from working age households makes the case for a return to welfare reform stronger. We need reforms across all types of benefit - and particularly the Household Benefit Cap, which is no longer really constraining the growth of really large claims. Over the weekend Kemi Badenoch and Helen Whately have been setting out our plans to fix this.

A significant number of households are getting a lot more in benefits than the average person gets to take home after working full time. We need a system that’s fair to taxpayers as well as those benefitting from it.

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Postscript: some other consequences of the changes to the FRS

So far DWP have only updated the years since 2021. So a lot of the statistical series that flow from it now have a break in the series.

Labour’s preferred measure of relative child poverty is affected by this:

In some cases the break in the series is really massive, like the 90/10 ratio:

There are similar-ish data sets that won’t have this problem. We know from a different set of ONS statistics (which don’t have the same series break) that overall income inequality fell under the last Conservative government. Having increased from 33% in 1997 the Gini coefficient rose to 39% in 2008, and 37% in 2010, but had fallen back to 33% by 2024:

But these other statistics don’t have the same details as those from DWP’s Family Resources Survey, so quite a lot of comparisons will have to be restricted to the short term - until and unless the figures are revised back further.

I don’t mean to downplay any ideological, or anti-Jewish motivation on his part. And he had a prior record of criminal violence, which he should have been deported for.

But as well as those things this also appears to be yet another case of a dangerously mentally ill individual not being dealt with properly. This is a big problem, and one where time and time again, we fail to learn the lessons.

Let me start by taking you back three decades. Here’s a quote from the Psychiatric Bulletin, of August 1994:

***

On Thursday, 17 December 1992, Jonathan Zito was travelling home by London Underground with his brother Christopher. Jonathan had met his family at Gatwick Airport and there had been insufficient room in his friend’s car, so the rest of the family had gone on ahead. The brothers stood waiting for a change of train on the Piccadilly Line at Finsbury Park Station, chatting to each other in a crowd of waiting passengers.

On the platform was a large, shabbily dressed, black man acting in a bizarre manner. In the era of community care, floridly psychotic per sons are not an unusual sight on the streets of the capital or on its transport services. The waiting passengers ignored Christopher Clunis until he came very close behind the Zito brothers on the edge of the platform. Without any warning, Clunis suddenly stabbed Jonathan Zito three times in the face, one of the wounds penetrating upwards over his eye and into his brain.

Clunis was a paranoid schizophrenic. He had occupied a filthy bedsit where a quantity of prescribed medication which he had not been taking was found by the police. There were various items of correspondence from both hospitals and the social services. At his trial he was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility and admitted to Rampton maximum security hospital under Section 37/41 of the Mental Health Act, 1983.

****

At Clunis’ trial the following summer, Zito’s widow Jayne, who had herself worked as a deputy manager of a rehabilitation unit for the mentally ill, declared that her husband’s death had been both predictable and avoidable.

An inquiry published in February 1994 agreed. The report catalogued 'a whole series of violent attacks' by Clunis over four years, often involving knives.

It lamented the “catalogue of failure and missed opportunity” in the care of Clunis, including the absence of any proper assessment of his history and propensity for violence, the treatment of successive hospital admissions as unrelated incidents, and a pattern of premature discharge. He had already been in hospital in Jamaica before moving to the UK. It turned out that he had been assessed by, or directly under the care of, no less than 30 named psychiatrists, had 10 episodes of in-patient care, and was remanded into prison or police custody on three separate occasions.

But he had bounced around the system for years without anyone ever getting a grip. The inquiry blamed “one failure or missed opportunity after another.”

And yet, and yet….

All the old problems, and some new ones too

Fast forward 34 years, and a new inquiry is currently running through almost exactly the same litany of failures in another case, which led to yet more innocent people being killed.

On 13 June 2023, Valdo Calocane killed three people in Nottingham: university students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65.

Calocane was well known to mental health services, having been sectioned four times. He was also well known to the police. He had been discharged in late 2022 despite refusing his medication and failing to engage with staff. At the time of the killings, he was, in the words of the inquiry, “unlawfully at large.”

It has emerged that in May 2020, Calocane had kicked at a neighbour’s door while in a state of psychosis, so frightening her that she jumped from a first-floor window and suffered a serious spinal injury.

It has also been revealed in the CQC review of Calocane’s care that risk assessments minimised or omitted key details, including the fact that he was refusing to take his medication and was having ongoing and persistent symptoms of psychosis. It identified points where poor decision-making, omissions and errors of judgement contributed to a situation where a patient with very serious mental health issues did not receive the support and follow-up he needed.

The families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates have said that the services involved in Calocane’s care “have blood on their hands.”

They are right - almost every problem in the Zito case is replicated - but with some new problems on top.

For example, officials blamed “data protection” for failing to connect multiple incidents.

The therapeutic culture now also plays a role. For example, Nottingham University had thought about expelling Caolocane in early 2022 after he attacked his flatmate. But they decided not to expel the violent student because it might cause him “stress” and would have “impacted on his mental health”. Eleanor Turner, the university’s head of counselling, was worried that he would experience “stigma around what happened”.

And above all, racial ideology now provides another factor preventing effective action.

As part of a preliminary investigation in the Calocane case an NHS Trust executive said:

“I think, also, people would be thinking about the over-representation of young Black men under the Mental Health Act … So I’m sure that they were considering it.

Mental health professionals had been “leaning towards” sectioning him, but they eventually decided to release him into the community after considering “research that shows over-representation of young black males in detention.” He went on to kill three innocent people. Some of those involved deny this was a factor in how they handled him. I don’t believe them.

I cannot stress how strongly the culture in public services is shaped by this ideology. Since 2020 very few people in public services will not have had to go on training to do with racial justice, or been drilled about “intersectionality”. This ideology is everywhere.

And it has consequences. It is, for example, why the head teacher of Axel Rudakubana’s school was made to remove her description of him as “sinister” in an official document:

“I was told my attitude towards risk around him was because I perceived him to be a black boy with a knife, they thought I was racially profiling him.”

It is also why references to Rudakubana being “cold, calculating” and “angry” were removed from his care plan. The ideology will not let public servants describe accurately what they are seeing.

The scale of the problem

The Zito inquiry made a series of recommendations which were accepted in full. This included mandating an independent inquiry into every homicide committed by someone under mental health care.

The Confidential Inquiry into Homicides and Suicides by Mentally Ill People - which had been established two years before - was tasked with collecting these reports, and recording patterns across the country of violence of this kind, in hope that lessons were learned across the health service rather than buried in the specific trust where each tragedy occurred.

That organisation still exists today, now known as the “National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health”, and run by the University of Manchester.

Dropping the “homicide” part of the name reflects a decision by funders in 2018 to take this out of their remit - though it has now been added back in.

The NCISS’ most recent report analysed the 5,733 homicide convictions in England, Wales and Scotland reported between 2013 and 2023. Of these, an estimated 622 perpetrators were patients in recent (<12 months) contact with mental health services.

This accounts for more than one in ten general population homicides, an average of 57 killings every year, by someone with mental health challenges.

***

In 2010 Julian Hendy founded the group Hundred Families. Hendy’s father was killed by a mentally ill stranger three years prior, and the organisation was set up to campaign to reduce the number of mental health-related killings, and to help other families affected.

As part of this work, Hendy has worked tirelessly to compile a database of mental health related killings in the UK, stretching back to 1993 when the government first ordered NHS Trusts to commission inquiry reports following mental health-related homicides, on the recommendation of Ritchie’s report.

This makes for sobering reading. Thousands of examples, all across the country, of devastatingly violent attacks on innocent loved ones or strangers. What connects them all is that they were committed by dangerously ill individuals, who simply should not have been allowed to roam the streets.

So far, Hendy has documented 2,462 mental health related homicides, from press reports, inquiry reports and sentencing remarks. This translates to over 100 deaths of this kind, per year.

These are big numbers, but reducing this problem to mere statistics glosses over the horror. Here are some recent examples of what those numbers mean in practice:

July 2024, Brompton - A British Army officer stabbed many times outside a barracks in Kent. The court hears that attacker Anthony Esan was discharged from the care of Medway Early Intervention Services to the Medway Low-Intensity Support Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) only a month before.

30 July 2024, Telford - Paranoid schizophrenic off his medication fatally batters his mother with a claw hammer and seriously injures his father. The killer had previously been sectioned following an incident in 2021 in which he had attempted to attack his mother with a baseball bat.

30 Apr 2024, Hainault - Psychotic man with schizo-affective disorder fatally stabs schoolboy with a sword and seriously assaults others after taking ayahuasca and cannabis.

July 2023, Harrow - Psychotic man repeatedly and fatally stabs neighbour 39 times with a sword. The murder happened months after the killer had been sectioned and released.

11 Jul 2023, Hayes - Psychotic man with paranoid schizophrenia repeatedly and fatally stabs his stepfather after a drugs binge.

20 Nov 2020, Tamworth - Floridly psychotic man repeatedly and fatally stabs girlfriend then runs her over.

Feb 2019, Borth - Paranoid schizophrenic fatally stabs stranger 10 days after being released from a secure psychiatric unit. It was reported in April 2025 that the family of the victim had recently learnt that the killer was now allowed out on visits.

The Mental Health Act 2025

One might expect evidence of this sort to weigh heavily on those seeking to amend our mental health legislation, as Labour sought to do at the end of last year.

However, from the beginning, conversations surrounding this legislation were more weighted towards reducing “mental health inequality”, and increasing the “autonomy” of mentally ill people, rather than protecting the public.

Indeed, this was its guiding principle. Labour’s Manifesto declared that “the operation of the Mental Health Act discriminates against Black people who are much more likely to be detained than others” promising to “give patients greater choice, autonomy, enhanced rights and support”.

This hands-off view had been building up in the expert community for some time.

Milestones include the 2018 Wessley Report “Modernising the Mental Health Act: Increasing choice, reducing compulsion”. The 2020 “Summer of Floyd” accelerated the debate. The last government produced a white paper and draft legislation, criticised by a select committee for not going far enough.

For too long there has been an acceptance (without any debate) that any disparities in the rates of people sectioned must automatically reflect discrimination and be a problem.

This is odd, because we do not make this assumption in any other field of public health. We accept, and deal with, the fact that some communities are more likely to suffer from certain things, from sickle cell to diabetes. And in the case of potentially dangerous mental health cases, we have to think about not just the patient’s own wellbeing, but also the risk of harm to others.

Professor Swaran Singh, one of the leading researchers in this field, has also pointed out the obvious flaw in trying to crowbar into health legislation the language of racial disproportionality. Put simply, disease is not egalitarian, and the higher rates of detention among Black patients, Singh’s research suggests, reflect higher rates of serious mental illness rather than discriminatory clinical practice.

Despite these criticisms, Labour’s Mental Health Act passed in 2025 included provisions to raise the threshold for detention and Community Treatment Orders under the 1983 Act, while reducing the duration for which patients can be held.

As a result of this legislation, it is no longer sufficient to justify detention or a CTO based on the “interests of the patient’s health or safety”; instead, there must now be a risk of “serious harm” to the patient or others, with explicit consideration given to the “nature, degree, and likelihood of that harm arising.”

These changes to the law will reinforce and accelerate the hands off approach to mental health. They will directly lead to more dangerously unstable individuals left to their own devices in our communities, posing a grave risk to themselves, their families and the general public.

Conclusion: Time to think again

There are all kinds of things we need to do to change the treatment of dangerous mentally ill people.

We need to deal with the problems of fragmentation and chaos which have gone unsolved from Zito to Calocane.

We need to think about big questions about who should be out in the community at all - and the downsides of the well-meaning closure of secure institutions since the 1960s.

But as a first step we must think again and bin the disastrous hands-off, racial ideology which has grown up around mental health in recent years.

In March, Kemi Badenoch said:

We will stop putting ideology ahead of public safety.

We will overhaul Labour’s Mental Health Act. And we are going to detain people who pose a risk to the public. Keeping them safe, keeping the public safe.

We cannot have dangerous men running around our towns and cities stabbing people.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was not a one-off. There was one in Edinburgh this week. Another one in Birmingham.

In November, a man got on a train in Cambridgeshire and started stabbing passengers even though earlier that day, he had already stabbed someone on a train in London.

It’s the state’s job to stop these things - but the British public is being left in harm’s way.

Sadly, just a month later, we see yet another example of violence and people in harm’s way from someone who should not be on our streets.

It is time to put the interests of the public, and the victims, first.

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Two men - one of them 76 years old - stabbed for the crime of being “visibly Jewish”.

The too-long list of recent antisemitic attacks got a bit longer.

The authorities were quick to stress that the terrorist was a “British national” (though born in Somalia). Sadly, the same was true of the Manchester synagogue murderer.

But if this is meant to calm people, I have to say that people being radicalised here is not reassuring in the slightest.

Kemi Badenoch recently announced a major review of how we can tackle:

Islamist extremism and how it feeds on separatism so we tackle both the ideology and the conditions that let it grow.

This is being led by Shadow Cabinet Ministers Chris Philp and Nick Timothy, and supported by former Prison Governor Ian Acheson.

Now, we should obviously stop the flow of migrants, ban all asylum claims from illegals, deport all foreign criminals and so on.

But we also have to stop the internal radicalisation too. There are lots of things we need to do like sorting out the Prevent programme.

But high on the to-do list must be sorting out our taxpayer-funded universities, which have become ground zero for radicalisation.

Campus takeover

Earlier this year the streets of Finchley were filled with scenes of jubilation. The Iranian community in London came together to celebrate the end of Ayatollah Khamenei, a man who just weeks earlier had ordered the massacre of 30,000 innocent Iranian citizens and whose regime presided over 20 potentially lethal plots targeting British citizens, residents, and journalists.

Meanwhile on British university campuses, organised student societies were mourning his death.

At the University of Manchester, for instance, students in the “Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society” announced they would be holding a candlelight vigil “honouring the Ayatollah”, while students at the University of Portsmouth re-shared a post from a page called ‘AbSoc Mental Health’ which declared that “This is an unimaginable loss for the entire Ummah. This is not the end to resistance.”

In total, there have been reports of student-led societies at 27 different universities expressing their condolences for the death of the Ayatollah or celebrating his “martyrdom”.

I say this not to say that the war in Iran is a good thing or convince you either way on that point. But to mourn Khamenei is another thing entirely.

For some observers, the prevalence of these extreme views will come as no surprise. In recent months, a number of disturbing videos have emerged showing this kind of extremist preaching being delivered to students.

One, filmed at the University of Manchester’s Islamic Society, showed students being addressed by a preacher who declared that “talking to women takes you to hell” and that “Hamas jihadists are martyrs, like Muslims stabbed in London; they are all going to heaven equally.”

Another emerged days later, showing a preacher addressing the Islamic Society at Queen Mary University of London, declaring that it is God’s command to wage jihad and that “those who rule by any rule other than the law of Allah, they are heretics, they are oppressors.”

These examples are clearly only the tip of the iceberg. As the Community Security Trust recently set out in written evidence to Parliament, there are now coordinated and organised student movements who host influential figures with extremist views and are increasingly vocal in their support for the leaders of proscribed terror organisations.

The CST found that there are 45 Ahlul‑Bayt university societies, or AbSocs, across the country, coordinated by an organisation called the Muslim Student Council (MSC). The MSC’s national conference, which took place last month on the KCL campus, featured the sale of the Ayatollah’s autobiography alongside a book about a fighter in the IRGC.

At least 18 of these societies appeared to mourn or glorify Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah, following his assassination in September 2024, with even more doing the same following the Ayatollah’s death in January. Shortly after Nasrallah’s death, it was reported that the Shia cleric Mohammed Khani, who had been among the mourners at Nasrallah’s funeral, attended a SOAS AbSoc event, and had previously joined Westminster AbSoc for a “hike for Lebanon” in November 2024.

Left unchecked, the rot of this extremism, along with the antisemitism that accompanies it, is beginning to spread throughout the student population.

A recent poll found that one in five university students in Britain would not want to live with a Jewish person.

I have italicised that because I think it is remarkable.

Sadly, it is also unsurprising, because the open expression of this hatred is also growing more common.

The 7th of October, for instance, now appears in some quarters to have become an annual moment for students to signal their implicit support for Hamas and their massacre of Jews. Last year, members of Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society displayed a six-foot banner that read “Glory to our martyrs.”

Members of Cardiff Students for Palestine shared an image apparently depicting an armed militant standing on the head of another person, accompanied by the caption, “Lest we forget: occupation soldiers scattered beneath those blessed feet, trembling before the fearless.”

Meanwhile, Middlesex Palestine Solidarity Society re-shared a post depicting militant paragliders with the words: “We stand with those who continue to fight for justice from Gaza to Jerusalem, from the river to the sea.”

Some groups have now abandoned any pretence of hiding this radicalism. Last year, eighteen British student groups, including those affiliated with the LSE, University of Edinburgh, and UCL, publicly supported a legal bid to remove Hamas from the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, claiming that this “creates an atmosphere where Palestine advocacy becomes a legal risk”.

Pushed around

What’s really happening is that these universities are being pushed around by militant staff and students.

For example, UCL’s branch of the University and College Union passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory” shortly after the Hamas attacks. UCL’s “Director of equality, inclusion, and culture”, Addeel Khan, is a trustee of Save One Life UK, a charity under investigation for links to Hamas.

What does this culture mean in the real world?

Zahra Farooque, who graduated from UCL in 2021, was charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder for targeting an arms factory. UCL neuroscience student Mohammed Nasser was arrested after allegedly assaulting a pro-Israel demonstrator in Brighton. Qesser Zuhrah, 20, was studying social sciences at UCL before being arrested over alleged offences linked to the activities of Palestine Action. These problems have been going on for a long time. In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had run the Islamic Society at UCL, attempted to detonate explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Nor is it confined to UCL. The Office for Students reported 70 cases of Islamist radicalisation cases in higher education institutions which were escalated to Prevent officers in the 2023-24 academic year. This represented a 75% increase on the previous year.

Conclusions

The list of examples of this sort goes on and on. My colleague Laura Trott MP has also been doing a fine job raising the alarm. But the government is asleep at the wheel, and I suspect since Gorton and Denton their appetite to do anything serious will have waned further.

Perhaps the most damning sign of how bad the situation has become came this January, when it was reported that the UAE, one of our closest Muslim allies in the Middle East, had begun restricting federal funding for citizens wishing to study at any British university, due to concerns about the extent of the influence of Islamic extremism on campuses.

The UAE knows better than most the dangers of radical Islamism, and what is required to prevent it gaining a grip on society. This starts with our universities, with the young and impressionable.

If we don’t want more and more terrorist attacks, perhaps it’s time we started listening?

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-Xi Jinping

I have been meaning to write this for ages, but Dan Wang’s book Breakneck is really, really great.

His framing - the “engineering state” of China vs the “lawyerly state” of the US - has been so widely adopted exactly because he’s hit a nerve.

It’s a depressing book to read in Europe because of the endless references to how un-dynamic and bureaucratic even America is compared to China.

Dan, come to Europe - when it comes to bureaucracy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Wang makes clear the downsides as well as the upsides of the “engineering state” - including the horrific social engineering - his history of the one-child policy is harrowing - I had thought of it as mainly local officials fining and harassing people - in reality it was a horrific campaign of mass forced abortions.

But I want to dwell here on just one little bit of the book - about why and how China has become the dominant industrial power.

I just want to quote some snippets here in the hope you’ll go out and read it!

*******

Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.

China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.

Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. []

Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers—and prioritizing defense—more than ever.

The engineering state builds big in part because it is made up of self-professed communists who grew up admiring the soviet union. Communist Party leaders like Xi Jinping studied in an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them production was a noble deed to advance communism while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects whereas consumers will waste money on themselves. It is hostile to ordinary people having much command of resources, which empowers an individual’s agency rather than the state’s.

Xi has forcefully pushed back against the idea that China needs more generous welfare. In a major speech in 2021, he said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development… we should not go overboard with social transfers. We must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare”.

Under Mao China practiced a more literal form of communism, with full control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks”

The engineering state is much more interested in promoting building and man manufacturing than services. China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars a year (one third electric, two thirds combustion), out of an annual global market of around ninety million cars sold. China’s domestic market absorbs less than half its production. China produces so much in part because every province wants to be an automotive production hub. The country has over a hundred automotive brands, most of them small, all fighting over sales . The competition is so fierce in part because auto companies receive extensive support from local governments, who all try to promote their champion through cheap credit and rebates to local companies.

Shenzen was China’s greatest boomtown and therefore, the world’s. Its population soared from three hundred thousand in 1980 to seven million in 2000 and eighteen million in 2020.

Foxconn’s manufacturing campus in the north of Shenzen occupies five hundred acres. The site has factories of course, and dormitories. It also has grocery stories, cafes, a fire brigade, a hospital, cinemas, swimming pools, and vendor-operated restaurants. The factory is the size of a city. The population peaks in early fall as production ramps up for the Christmas season. Dormitories fill up then, with up to six men or women crammed into one room. Assembly lines operated for three eight hour shifts a day; there is never a minute that factories aren’t producing iPhones. At the peak times three hundred thousand people work at Foxconn’s Shenzen campus.

Chinese officials climbed over each other to host a Foxconn facility . The salivated at the number of jobs and the amount of tax revenues the company could create for their jurisdiction, which could elevate them to higher office… []

In 2016 Henan “borrowed” workers from state-owned coal companies to meet the iPhone production surge. In 2017 the Financial Times reported that up to three thousand high school students had to work on assembly lines – a few of them for eleven hour days – and if they did not their school withheld their graduation diplomas. They were euphemistically called “interns” who assembled iPhones for “vocational experience.”

[Helen Wang worked] sourcing components for the first iPhone. In an interview Helen told me that her first thought on receiving an assignment was often “I need to build a city”. Construction on this scale was something that Apple, Foxconn and government officials did together. Helen told me that Shenzen conducted levelling operations along mountains to make land suitable for production.

A 2012 story in the New York Times reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nibne thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China they were able to do it in two weeks.

…the United States and China are inversions of each other. Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention: the first solar cell, the first personal computer, first in flight. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China’s ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things.

The fourteenth five-year plan released in 2021 demands that he manufacturing share of the economy stay constant. Manufacturing already accounts for 28 percent of China’s GDP, which is much higher than Germany’s 21 percent and Japan’s 20 percent, to say nothing of deindustrialized economies like the United States and the United Kingdom (both around 10 percent). Xi has repeatedly stated that he’s not interested in abandoning manufacturing for services. In authoritative speeches, Xi cited “certain Western countries” that forsook the real economy for the fictitious economy. No points for guessing which Western countries these might be. And Xi has declared that “the real economy is the basis of everything . . . so we must never deindustrialize.”

If an engineer in Shenzhen has an idea for a new product, it’s easy to tap into an eager network of investors. Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics.

Silicon Valley used to be like this too, but now it lacks a critical link in the chain—the manufacturing workforce. The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.

The American imagination has been too focused on the creation of tooling and blueprints. Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up of products”. Grove saw Silicon Valley transition from doing both invention and production to specializing only in the former. And he understood quite well that technology ecosystems would rust if the research and development no longer had a learning loop from the production process.

Bell Labs invented the first solar cell, and German companies produced solar production equipment. Beijing’s designation of solar as a “strategic emerging industry” invited Chinese companies to rush into this industry. Chinese companies bought German equipment and competed fiercely to make the most efficient solar cells. By the mid-2010s, Chinese companies figured out how to make all the German tools, as well as the entirety of the solar value chain. The plunge in solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science—which is the United States’ strong suit—than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.

Tesla’s presence jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term “catfishing” for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster. That’s exactly what they did to raise their game. When Tesla vehicles started rolling out of the Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, BYD saw its sales decline by 11 percent, while profits fell by 42 percent. But Tesla would eventually do the whole market a favor. As in the United States, the company’s audacious branding stimulated consumers to think of electric vehicles as more than high-powered golf carts. And Tesla made investments in China’s tooling ecosystem that other automakers exploited to produce better cars. BYD benefited as well, reporting record profits in 2023 and becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle maker. And even the Communist Party’s main newspaper praised how Tesla produced the “catfish effect” for Chinese firms.

It’s hard, I admit, to draw a straight line between the loss of, for example, television manufacturing in the United States through the 1980s to the stumbles by Boeing and Intel over the past decade. But if we think about technology ecosystems as communities of engineering practice, it makes sense that factory closures accelerated as process knowledge dissolved, prompting production problems and more job losses. And it also makes sense that Chinese workers went from merely assembling iPhones to producing some of their most valuable components as well. As one country lost its process knowledge, the other gained whole industries.

…in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars.

The United States will not overcome the lawyerly society by debating the kinds of issues that law students thrill to: the correct ruling on any particular case or the personalities on the Supreme Court. I want to invoke the classic line by professor Grant Gilmore, in a text often assigned to first-year law students: “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

Rather, I want Americans to experience what the previous generation of Chinese have felt: a sense of optimism about the future driven in large part by physical dynamism. Chinese who have experienced the country’s blistering economic growth over the past four decades look to the past with pride and to the future with hope. When residents of Chongqing or Shenzhen see a new cityscape unfold before their eyes, they expect the future to keep changing for the better.

Conclusions

Things I think the book brings out well are:

• How internal competition between Chinese state governments leads to a subsidy arms race and stimulates over production.

• How state-level governments promote local champions, on the one hand increasing competition between firms, but also leading to ever-greater subsidies.

• How China absorbs new technologies and firms and uses them to spur internal competition.

• The importance of economy-level scale and the industrial commons.

• The importance of leaning-by-doing and the long term unsustainability of the 1990s vision of “Designed in California. Assembled in China”

… but there is so much more in the book, including on Chinese society and the government’s unique relationship with the tech industry.

You can get it here - honestly, it’s great!

We’ve moved from the “Information Age” to the “Screen Time”.

As an MP I’ve visited a lot of schools - and I often ask kids what they did the night before. Some of the answers are horrifying: “four hours on YouTube,” or “six hours on TikTok”.

You don’t often get: “I was reading.”

James Marriott has nailed down the shift to “post literate age” and set out some of the consequences. In fact he has a book out soon - The New Dark Ages (which sounds jolly).

He’s written about this better than I will, but this really isn’t just a meme, or old people complaining about “the yoof of today”.

The trends are clear in the data. In the UK the share of children who say they enjoy reading has gone from over 58% in 2016 to under a third now. Children both enjoy reading less, and are less likely to actually read - the two are obviously strongly connected:

And this is a change which is still gathering pace - the biggest declines in reading enjoyment and daily reading are among the younger children who have spent longer in the TikTok world. They are much less likely to get the reading habit.

The same trends are there in other countries - here’s data for the number of books read for pleasure in the last year by U.S. 12^th graders (via Jean Twenge).

Basically, first TV came for books, and now screen time is hammering reading further:

The US has a longer run of time-use data than the UK, and you can see that time spent reading for pleasure is in decline among adults too. It shows you two things which might seem surprising.

• On the one hand there is individual polarisation: those who still read for pleasure read slightly more if anything, and the decline in time spent reading is all driven by fewer people reading for pleasure.

• On the other hand, there seems to be no social polarisation: the decline in the share of people who read for pleasure is hitting every group: more and less educated, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, city folk and country dwellers - and most age groups1.

It isn’t just the anglophone world either.

In the FT a while back Sarah O’Connor reported that:

“This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

The revolution will not be televised

I introduced this piece by treating the rise of short form video and the decline in reading as two sides of the same coin. And the two are linked in multiple ways. For starters, TikTok and reading books compete for time - you can’t do both.

They are also related in the same way that junk food and marathon running are related - having more of one might hinder your ability to enjoy the other - or certainly make the other unattractive.

But the smartphone / social media debate (which I have written about before) is only partly overlapping with the reading decline debate.

For starters, the decline in reading started before smartphones turned up. And initially the “world wide web” was mainly text - the 90s web couldn’t really handle video. In fact we hoped back then that we were going to be spending more time reading interesting stuff online, and less time watching brainrot TV.

YouTube only launched in 2005, and TikTok not till 2017. It has really been since then every social media platform has been trying to turn itself into a video platform.

And then there are different types of video. Broadcast TV is tanking fast, particularly among younger people. In 2019 71% of 16-24 year olds watched broadcast TV on average each week. By 2024 only 45% did.

And of course there are different types of reading too. There is probably something different about three hours of concentrated reading of a book compared to reading fragmented snippets of articles and microblogging sites like x.com.

Teasing apart the impact of all these different changes - less reading, less TV, more short form video is likely to be very difficult.

Why it matters

There are two different theories out there about why the decline of reading and the rise of the post-literate society might matter

• Worry number 1: Inability to read complex texts, and general cognitive decline. One category of worry is that people not in the habit of reading will struggle when they have to. When you are confronted with a complex text you will struggle or take things in more slowly. That might mean you learn practical things more slowly, whether you are studying engineering or reading the manual for a complex process. It might mean you can never really enjoy great literature. Connected to this is a more general concern that it might impede your general cognitive ability: that as well as being worse at reading, you might be worse at thinking as a result.

• Worry number 2: Moving us from a rational / discursive culture to an emotive, oral one. This is the idea that “the medium is the message” and that reading makes you think differently about the world. That reading encourages an analytical, discursive, rational way of thinking about things, while short-form video encourages an emotional, immediate, visceral non-rational way of thinking.

Let’s try and look at both.

Brain fade?

Worry 1 certainly has some data points to support it. I don’t just mean the endless anecdotal articles from university lecturers complaining that new students can’t bear to read anything of any length - though I am struck how many such stories there have been recently. (There are examples, here, here, here, and here).

Over at the FT John Burn Murdoch has brought together some of the evidence of a decline in cognitive performance since the launch of the smartphone - reversing the improvements of the twentieth century. It’s pretty stark:

Of course, there are some things potentially muddying the picture, like the global increase in migration to developed countries and the rise of self-reported mental health challenges across the west. But the numbers above are pretty striking and it is not at all obvious that these other factors can explain the changes well, or at all.

None of this isolates the effect of reading specifically, or tells us whether it has protective effects. But the totality does seem to be hitting people’s ability to think.

Ragebait

That brings me to worry number two: that we are moving from a “cool” world of argument, careful reasoning and delayed judgement to a “hot” world of instant gratification, visceral emotion, fragmented and hysterical reaction.

These debates are not new.

In the late 1950s Richard Hoggart’s The uses of literacy worried that people had gone from reading serious, morally-improving stuff, to gorging themselves on “admass” - crappy, commercial, manipulative, Americanised, “candy-floss” rubbish.

In the 1980s Neil Postman worried further that we were “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by gorging on terrible TV, on which image and emotion dominated, and what little information there was was fragmented or superficial.

Some people will read this and say - here we go again, the oldies are in a moral panic. My view is that these previous observations were correct and the shift to short-form video on demand and even less reading is another step downward.

There’s no doubt that younger generations are getting less of their news from newspapers (including online) and more from social media - which is a lot more video heavy.

I think there is no question that the rise of new forms of media has played a role in balkanising our politics - people can get reinforcement of their views on tap and end up in algorithmic echo chambers. That could happen even in a world with only the written word. But I think that the shift from reading to video turbocharges all this.

There is a world of difference between getting your information from the six o’clock news and getting it from TikToks about Gaza, where there is no attempt at balance, no context and even greater focus on emotion. If you are interested in immigration, x.com will feed you more and more visceral content. Neil Postman argued that only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed. I wouldn’t say only - but the printed word certainly lends itself better to “on the one hand, on the other” than a 10 second video clip does.

It is all tied up with broader cultural trends of course: TV got dumber too, and went from Civilisation to contemporary documentaries which seem to assume you have been lobotomised.

But there is something about the formula algorithm + short form video that is ruthlessly potent. And if you aren’t consuming anything offsetting - even handed, rational, concentration-requiring - that is even more so. And when I talk to young people in my constituency, the results on their world-views are stark.

Conclusion

At the moment I am helping our six year old to learn to read. It is not easy. Unlike talking, it doesn’t come naturally. It requires mental effort. I can feel it stretching and growing his brain.

One of the reasons that we (on the Conservative side) have been pushing the government so hard to ban smartphones from schools and get kids off social media is that there is enough evidence already to worry that young people are losing crucial skills, and suffering cognitively because of the decline of reading. Given how strongly the Labour government had set their face against the phone ban in schools I was really pleased we made them change their minds.

There are other positive changes. I’m glad to see that “World Book Day” in our kids’ school seems to be becoming a bit less about dressing up, and a bit more about, er, actually reading. One of the successes of the 2010 Conservative government was the introduction of Structured Synthetic Phonics (SSP) and things like the Year 1 Phonics check, which have seen English schools climbing the international league tables.

But given the cultural drift towards a post literate age, much more is going to be needed if we want to remain a literate people.

What would you do?

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But - I also travel about 2,000 miles a month on East Midlands Railway, up and down between Market Harborough and London.

I work away, and tap away on my laptop.

But I can also listen to things on headphones too.

And this year I have been travelling in a fug of beautiful choral music. The springtime fields have never looked better scrolling by.

The reason for this unexpected binge of sacred music is pure chance - I discovered a poll of choir directors & singers of their favourite pieces. This provided a motherlode of good recommendations, and opened up lots of avenues of exploration.

I’ve always had a soft spot for this kind of stuff1. But I can’t claim to know this world well, and the upside of that is there’s a lot of new territory to explore.

Reasons I love this stuff

I love it for multiple reasons:

First, I am a strong believer in the Lindy Effect, and if a tune is still being sung after hundreds of years, it is very likely to be fantastic. Thomas Tallis wrote If Ye Love Me in 1565, (the same year the pencil was invented). The fact that it is still popular now basically tells you that it is going to be amazing.

Second, there’s also something very pleasing about the way great tunes are shared around Europe and have mutated many times along the way. One tune can have multiple sets of words in multiple languages and, vice-versa, a text can turn into many pieces of music. For example:

• The traditional German tune Es ist ein Ros entsprungen has become in English both Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming but also A Great and Mighty Wonder. It got its current melody in 1609, but the words have been kicking around in Christian hymns since at least the 8th century.

• Good King Wensleslaus is a story about a tenth century king of Bohemia, married up with a 13^th century carol (Tempus adest floridum) discovered by 19^th century English hymnwriter Thomas Helmore in a Finnish song book from 1582. Boom!

• All Creatures of Our God and King got well known because Vaughan Williams arranged it in 1906, but the melody is from 17th century German Easter hymn Lasst uns erfreuen, and the words are an adaptation of a Umbrian Italian text from St Francis of Assisi in 1225.

• Puer nobis nascitur, AKA “Unto Us Is Born a Son” was translated by an Edwardian monk, but first appears in the 14th-century German text the Moosburg Gradual, which in turn is a kind of Greatest Hits of French pieces from the 12th and 13th centuries… and so on.

Third, I also love it because the choir is both a living instrument, and an immortal one.

Sure, Fleetwood Mac were around for a long time and had a lot of personnel changes, but there are plenty of cathedral choirs that have existed for many hundreds of years. The choirs of York Minister, Hereford, Winchester, Rochester and Wells are all older then England.

And I like the fact that they have their own weird quirks and traditions. For example, take Salisbury Cathedral. When boys or girls qualify as full members they have a ritual involving bumping their heads on the “bumping stone”, which has worn away from hundreds of years of this sort of thing. These days they also gently bonk new members on the head with an ENORMOUS prayer book.

Kids are capable of much more than we think. My son (6) loves being allowed to use an axe to chop wood, and though I always worry for his tiny fingers, it is very good for his morale to be allowed to do this grown up thing.

Choirs are a hardcore example of that, where some of the finest and most complex music you can imagine is being performed by… a constantly-shifting ensemble of 7-to-13-year-olds - which is amazing when you think about it. Some of the music was also written by incredibly young people (of which more in a second).

Composers I didn’t know

There are many more2 reasons to love this music and there is so much more of it than I can describe here... but let me mention a couple of composers I didn’t know.

Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995)

I had never heard of him until this year. He is amazing. Having been a cathedral chorister from age nine at Gloucester Cathedral, he was paid to be the organist of a nearby church from age twelve. He later fought on the western front, and was organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 to 1967. He was born in the year they sent they sent the first ever wireless telegraph message, and died when Take That went to Number 1 with Never Forget.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book “Outliers” popularised the idea a lot of success comes from people just having a really huge amount of practice (10,000 hours) and there definitely is something in that idea.

Sumsion was friends with Elgar, Gerald Finzi and Vaughan Williams, but has quite a distinctive sound of his own. Wikipedia tells me that: “Sumsion displays a fondness for parallel thirds in the accompaniment, detached bass lines, and the descending minor third in the melody.” Sadly I’m not musical enough to know what that means, but even I can hear he has a particular sound, and it’s wonderful.

They that go down to the sea in ships seems to be his most popular work, and it is gorgeous, with the organ and choir rising and falling with the stormy sea, providing a rare opportunity to hit the most gigantic pipes and really low notes on the organ that vibrate all your internal organs.

Sumsion wrote several settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimmitis, including versions in G major and A major. There are fabulous recordings by St John’s Cambridge, with magnificent choral leaps and lush, warm resolutions.

Loads of his other pieces are fantastic too. He had an amazing range. He could do everything from hair-stand-on-end sparsity (Psalm 102) to incredible warmth. He wrote amazing music for Watt’s Cradle Song, based on a text written two centuries earlier in 1715.

William Crotch (1775-1847)

Returning to my point about extreme amounts of practice, the unfortunately named William Crotch really did start young.

From Wikipedia:

“William Crotch was born in Norwich, Norfolk, to a master carpenter. Like Mozart, he was a child prodigy, playing the organ his father had built. At the age of two he became a local celebrity by performing for visitors, among them the musician Charles Burney, who wrote an account of his visits for the Royal Society. The three-year-old Crotch was taken to London by his ambitious mother, where he not only played on the organ of the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, but performed for King George III.”

That’s a strong start.

I was professionally interested to learn that:

“He may have composed the Westminster Chimes in 1793, which are played by Big Ben each time it strikes the hour.”

His produced settings of lots of psalms – they are all great. Psalm 123 “Unto thee lift I up mine eyes” is particularly amazing.

His best-known piece now seems to be “Lo, Star-Led Chiefs” from his oratorio Palestine, which is really pretty.

Michael Praetorius (1571 – 1621)

Writing at the start of the seventeenth century in Germany, but influenced by the trendy new sounds wafting over the Alps from Italy. He seems to be most famous for his setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, though he didn’t write it - it is from a little earlier. He was incredibly prolific. In terms of secular music he wrote Terpsichore - a massive collection of 300 instrumental dances, many of the collected from all over Europe.

But the things I like most are his massive, massive… huge pieces of sacred music.

His setting of In Dulce Jubilo takes a gentle little tune and turns it up to 1,000.

The fast-paced Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland sounds like something from much later and sounds kinda like Bach, but a century earlier.

His accessibly-named collection Polyhymnia caduceatrix is full of fantastic tunes, but he also seems to have had a commitment to ordinary people making music and wrote a whole cycle for children - from which the stand out hit seems to be Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, (though Bach’s version from a hundred years later seems to have eclipsed it)

Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958)

I really love his famous works: The Lark Ascending… Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and his Pastoral symphony.

But I didn’t really know his sacred music. It’s fantastic - and I had never listened to it before.

He wrote fab settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.

His versions of The Truth Sent From Above, O Clap Your Hands, We Sing For All The Unsung Saints, O Taste and See… All People That on Earth Do Dwell… they’re all great.

Conclusion

This is wonderful, gorgeous music. But it turns out it’s under threat, from financial struggles and the wider decline in mainstream Christianity.

The campaign group “Pipe Up for Pipe Organs” says that Britain is losing nine pipe organs a week. Cathedral schools are struggling too.

More positively, the CEO of the Cathedral Music Trust is visiting 100 choirs by bike to fundraise for choir music, and the Royal School of Church Music has a project to revive or establish 200 choirs.

These struggles are all the more reason that, having enjoyed hearing all this music by chance, I felt I should pass it on to you.

And any suggestions for further listening are very welcome!

Happy Easter!

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I went down on my hands and knees
Looking for trees,
Twin leaves that, sprung from seeds,
Were now too big
For stems much thinner than a twig.
These soon with chamomile and clover
And other fallow weeds
Would be turned over;
And I was thinking how
It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

- Andrew Young

* * * * *

I nearly died before I lived. I was born (in the early hours of the morning) with the umbilical cord caught round my neck, and the midwife went into a massive panic.

It got untangled in the end, but I was pretty close to never knowing what Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being here”.

No wedding day ceilidh. No first kiss. No seventh birthday fireworks. Never smelling newly cut grass, or fresh bread, or roasting coffee.

We are all lucky to have caught the bus to ever existing.

For some it’s a close-run thing. Our son (6) is the fruit of our eighth and was-always-going-to-be final round of IVF. When we did the pregnancy test, it was negative. We were heartbroken. But looking at it a little later (which you should never do) it showed a faint line. A tiny ribbon of hope in the wind.

We tested again the next day. A faint, just visible line. He caught the bus.

He sometimes drives us crazy, but this morning he was attacking me in the kitchen with a soft dinosaur, and he was happy because the tooth fairy brought him a pound, and I am so glad he is with us.

Say you were to ask me this very strange question: when did you try hardest not to drop something? I could answer easily.

After our daughter was born - after incredible endurance from my wife - our little daughter was cleaned up by the doctors, then given to me to carry back across the room, to snuffle on her mother’s breast. My first responsibility as a father.

I have never been so careful not to drop something.

She was only really a couple of handfuls then, but already wholly perfect.

* * * * *

Last night the House of Lords voted for an amendment which will decriminalise self-induced abortions all the way up the point of birth. So you will be able to kill a baby the day before it is about to be born, and face no legal consequences.

This is monstrous.

There is no magic that happens as you pass down the birth canal. There is no flash of light as your soul descends. There is no moral difference whatsoever between a baby the day before birth, and a baby a day after.

The thought that someone could poison or smash up the body of a baby and face no legal consequences is appalling. That’s an overused word these days so let me try again. The thought should make you sick.

Advocates for this appalling change play silly word games, but if the law banning late abortions is no longer enforced, it effectively won’t exist.

And everyone knows what is coming next. This amendment will result in horrific amateur home abortions. Some will be forced on women by men. But either way it will be horrific. And then the same people who advocated for this will then say we should “tidy up” the mess they made and allow the same things to happen in clinical settings too.

This is not even being done as a stand-alone new law, but as an amendment tacked on to the Crime and Policing Bill which the government originally said is intended to “protect the public and our town centres from antisocial behaviour, retail crime and shop theft”.

There have been no impact assessments, no public consultation, and almost no public debate. Polling shows people are overwhelmingly against abortion up to the day of birth. There were just 45 minutes of backbench debate on it in the Commons. But the law will be changed anyway.

The people pushing this - like Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Tonia Antoniazzi, are perfectly clear about where they stand. All conversations end in thought-terminating slogans, like: “my body my choice”. But this is nonsense. Yes, it is your body, but it also someone else’s body too. What about their rights?

Antoniazzi is at least perfectly clear. Times Radio host, Stig Abell asked her: “Any woman could end a pregnancy at any time, 35 weeks, 36 weeks, 37 weeks, without committing an offence. And you are comfortable with that?” Tonia replied: “Yes I am.”

Now, up to a point these things are debatable. When do you become a person? At the moment of conception? Or when you begin to think and feel, mid-way through pregnancy? Until last night the law had settled, uneasily, on the latter. But no one was pretending that full term babies were not people with rights. Until now.

One irony is that the government originally said that the Crime and Policing Bill would also “tackle the epidemic of… violence against women and girls that stains our society”.

Violence against girls? Now you can kill a baby girl and face no consequence. Perhaps your husband doesn’t want a girl. Unlucky her to have been dealt the wrong chromosome. The reason you kill the baby doesn’t matter, there will be no penalty.

Would this happen? It already is doing. The NHS says that there is clear evidence that sex-selective abortions are happening already in some communities.

None of this is abstract. In 2012 Sarah Catt was jailed for killing a baby at 39 weeks. The court said she took a “cold, calculated” decision for her own convenience and self-interest. She took pills at 39 weeks and gave birth, and never revealed where the body was. The court said she had a history of deceit and concealment. The judge said she did it because she thought the man with whom she was having an affair was the father.

From now on, that will be absolutely fine. There will be no prosecution for doing this.

* * * * * *

Most bad things happen not because people are like: “yay, let’s do something terrible”, but because we do what human beings are best at - we look the other way.

From the holocaust to the mass inhumane treatment of animals, people look the other way.

I am no exception. I wonder how much of the meat I have eaten in my life was raised in conditions of grotesque cruelty? I have never marched to stop the war, although several of our recent wars have brought nothing but utter disaster. And I have generally tried to stay out of the abortion debate. I would rather not think about it.

But this is now ridiculous. Murdering people is bad, and there is no debate that these babies who can now be killed are people, just like you and me.

Am I not a man and a brother? I am not a religious person, but I do think killing babies is bad.

Never mind the fact that they can think and feel. They can live. These days three in ten babies born at 22 weeks will survive. By 26 weeks it is 80 percent - and rising.

* * * * *

While they were at it last night, the Lords also voted to keep abortion pills-by-post, and rejected plans to return to requiring a medical assessment to prevent coercion.

We already know that this is being abused by bad men. In December 2024, Stuart Worby was jailed after spiking a woman’s drink and ending the life of her unborn child at 15 weeks gestation using abortion pills obtained through the pills-by-post scheme.

We also know pills-by-post is causing real problems. A FOI request in 2022 to six ambulance services found a 64% increase in ambulance call-outs from women concerned after taking abortion pills. A study found that 10,000 women, or 1 in 17, of those who took abortion pills at home prescribed by the NHS, required hospital treatment in 2020.

* * * * *

In January new data showed that the number of abortions in England and Wales had risen to a record high in 2023 - a 10% increase on the previous year. That brought the total to just under 300,000 a year across the UK - equivalent to the population of a city the size of Leicester every year.

Number of abortions, residents of England and Wales, 1969 to 2023

Someone said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and as rare as possible”, but it is no longer rare. We are close to one abortion for every two births.

I have written before about offering more support to people who want to have children. But it isn’t the number of people that conceive that has gone down. Compared to 1968 we have a quarter fewer births, but actually more conceptions. Abortion makes up the difference.

When I look at the charts above, I think of the lines from Andrew Young that I quoted at the top.

It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

300,000 people a year never get to be born. More than ten million lives have been ended this way since 1967.

They could have lived, but will never get to see the sun rise, never taste ice-cream and never feel a hug.

Left alone they would have mainly grown and lived. But they had no voice, and we took that all away from them.

The clinching argument in the 1960s for the legalisation of abortion was to avoid “back street” and home abortions.

But now the advocates of further liberalisation are backing DIY abortions in order to push on with their agenda: pills by post with no checks, and no prosecution for late abortions as long as you do it yourself and no clinician is involved.

This will lead to disasters and then the advocates of it will come back for more.

I voted against these changes and will vote to repeal them if I get a chance.

I don’t have many original thoughts to add to this long-running and emotive debate.

But one thing I think is missing is this.

There are loads of people who would like to adopt a baby. Particularly among those who cannot have children - which is a growing group as we all delay having kids.

The number of people who would adopt a baby is larger than those who would adopt or foster grown children. The people who take on bigger children are heroes and deserve medals.

But there are many people who don’t feel able to do this, but are longing for children and would adopt a baby. Meanwhile there are women who are pregnant and don’t feel they can bring up a child.

There must be a way to solve one problem with the other? To offer people the support they need to have a baby and a home for him or her to live in and be loved in? Shouldn’t people be given that choice and offered the help to make it?

People say that every child should be a wanted child, but there are many people who want and don’t have. My former colleague Michael Gove recalls how his adoptive mother told him: “You didn't grow under my heart, you grew in it”.

I know quite a few people who had the same love from an adoptive parent.

I think we have massively lost our way here. There are lots of things that are complicated, but killing babies is wrong.

There are lots of people who were on the road to life, but will never get to live. But they have no voice and we - including me - don’t like to think about it. So we look the other way.

That’s got to change.

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This is a very bad result, but no great surprise, because of three things the government have done.

• First, the government massively tightened employment regulation with the employment bill - this makes older more tested workers relatively more attractive. Why take on someone that may not work out if you won’t be able to get rid of them without huge costs?

• Second, Labour have massively hiked tax, and surprisingly have done so in a way that targets low wage workers. Younger people tend to earn less, so again they have borne the brunt. Reeves now admits there is a “valid argument” this was a mistake. No kidding.

• Third, Labour’s manifesto said: “Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage”. There have been different rates of the minimum wage for adults ever since it was set up in 1999, and for good reason. This pledge effectively told employers that wage costs for younger people would continue to rise faster than average.

Add it all up, what you get is higher youth unemployment.

U turn ahoy?

The government is now trying to execute a classic Starmer “partial U-turn”. The Treasury are briefing that they are retreating from plans to align the minimum wage, but the PM is insisting the policy hasn’t changed.

And having hiked tax across the board, Pat McFadden will announce on Monday that employers will receive a £3,000 taxpayer subsidy for hiring under-25s who have been on Universal Credit (UC) for more than six months.

One thing to note here is the difference in scale between the takeaway and the “giveaway”. The chancellor aimed to raise £25 billion from her across-the-board increase in Employers NI on low paid workers in Budget 2024. And a further £12.4 billion from her real terms increases in Income Tax at Budget 2025.

Longer term youth unemployment is certainly a growing problem. ONS say the number of 18-24 year-olds unemployed for over a year has grown from 86,000 when Starmer came to power to 121,000 now.

The offsetting action isn’t remotely on the same scale.

In total there are 274,000 people under 25 who have been unemployed for over 6 months. If 10% get a job over the next year that will cost £82 million in wage subsidies. So that’s a:

• £ 37,400,000,000 tax increase versus a

• £ 82,000,000 wage subsidy

We can generate different numbers if we look at UC claims, but the point remains, the tax takeaway alone is several orders of magnitude larger than this offsetting bung.1

The big squeeze

New Labour were careful to avoid setting a single rate to avoid youth unemployment. That lesson seems to have been forgotten, and is being re-learned the hard way.

Labour’s rash pledge to end different rates of the minimum wage was also really strangely timed, as differences in how much people earn per hour have been getting a lot smaller over the last 30 years, and the gaps have become particularly small among younger people.

This wage compression holds true whether we look at the gap between the top 90% and the bottom 10%, or at the gap between the top 80% and the bottom 20%, or whatever ratio you choose. This compression of earnings gaps is true at all ages.

We can look at the same data in a different way, by looking at the ratio of earnings between earning groups over time2.

An 18-21 year-old in the top quarter of earnings for his or her age group used to earn 50% more per hour than someone in the bottom quarter in 1997. Now they earn just 15% more.

Among over 50 year-olds, someone in the top 10% used to earn four times more per hour than someone in the bottom 10%. That is now more like three times as much.

Kicking the can

Torn between its rash manifesto pledge and the reality of rising youth unemployment, the government is kicking the can for now, with small bungs and delays to its policy on the minimum wage.

The Low Pay Commission Report which came out last month says:

“We have debated how to balance the Government’s ambition to lower the NLW age to 18 with its desire to avoid causing youth unemployment. In light of youth labour market conditions, we judge it better to take a cautious approach and backload the increases needed to reach alignment.”

Our proposed pathway to meeting the Government’s ambition is to reduce the NLW eligibility age to 20 in 2027. The evidence, including our consultation, suggests that the labour market treats 20 year olds differently to 18 and 19 year olds, and that around 70 per cent of 20 year olds are already paid at or above the NLW. Thereafter we also propose that 18 and 19 year olds will move together so that the NLW age will be lowered to 18 in 2028 or 2029. However, all of this will be subject to economic conditions and Government policy towards young people at the time. We will consult further with stakeholders on this approach.

They note that for young people the minimum wage is now very close to the average wage - it is 81% of the average for 18-20 year-olds.

Conclusion

On the Conservative side we opposed the tax increases and the damaging elements of Employment Bill. We have proposed funding 100,000 more apprenticeships for 18-21 year olds by reducing the number of low quality “debt trap” degrees.

In contrast, at present the government has created a big problem but is offering only small solutions.

Employers are still being told that if they plan to take on young people they can soon expect them to be being paid the same as 40 year olds.

The triple whammy of higher tax, much more regulation and the attempt to flatten wages has clearly increased youth unemployment in the UK compared to other countries. And this was all before the war in the Middle East. If we are going to end the tragedy of youth unemployment, the government needs to stop coming out with fiddly small policies - and have a much bigger rethink.

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The civil service is a weird mix. You have a bunch of people who are amazing and not paid much. And you have a bunch of people who are not good and should have been managed out ages ago. I worry that too often the good people leave not just because they are underpaid relative to their ability, but because they are sick of carrying the people who shouldn’t be there.

Other countries do better. Surely the vision has to be a civil service more like that in Singapore: a smaller number of better paid, much more effective people.

Excess people in the civil service don’t just fail to add value. They often subtract it. The devil makes work for idle hands to do, and there is a connection between regulatory bloat and having a large low-quality workforce. If you have a lean, focussed high-IQ team, you are more likely to get on with core business, rather than have people who spend their time pumping out unnecessary initiatives or EDI nonsense.

There are multiple issues with the civil service. There is incredible churn. Because you generally can’t get promoted in place, the Treasury has faster turnover than McDonald’s. Over one fifth (20.8%) of civil servants in the Treasury left the Civil Service or Department in 2024-2025.

Too often an official would just be getting good at a brief and I would turn up at their desk to find they had been replaced again with a newbie. The Fulton Report (1969) complained about the cult of the generalist but I’m afraid it is still there. Efforts to build specialist professions in finance, project management etc have light years to go. The Civil Service Commissioners act like gatekeepers and the service has far too few people coming in from outside. Where people have spent more of their career outside it makes a big difference and it’s not a coincidence that some of the best people I met in government had done that.

But in this piece I want to focus on performance management. Let’s start with recent history.

Performance art

Concerned about these issues, the Cameron government in 2012 brought in measures to strengthen performance management.

This Civil Service Reform Plan, spearheaded by Francis Maude, warned that “exceptional performance is too rarely recognised and underperformance not rigorously addressed”.

There were two bits to the plan.

• For the Senior Civil Service, it brought in a system requiring each department to identify the top 25% and the bottom 10% of performers.

• And for the rest of the civil service (the less senior people) it encouraged something similar - and several large departments adopted a similar arrangement for their lower (“delegated”) grades.

Unsurprisingly, this “enforced distribution” model, proved deeply unpopular with the unions who argued that it was discriminatory and harmful to staff wellbeing.

By 2017 it was already in retreat as departments began to drop formal percentage targets for delegated grades, and in 2019 forced distribution was officially abandoned for Senior Civil Servants as well.

So we now have two systems in place. Senior Civil Servants are assessed by all departments using four box ratings: ‘Exceeding’, ‘High Performing’ ‘Achieving’ and ‘Partially Met’, with a recommended “expected distribution”.

Delegated grades, meanwhile, have since 2019 operated under a “flexible Performance Management Framework” which effectively allows departments to determine their own performance management system.

The current government says that this reform “has enabled departments to adopt a Performance Management approach to best suit their organisational and cultural needs”.

Is this just fancy code for “we’ve let them give up”?

I went to investigate, by firing off a barrage of 150+ Parliamentary Questions.

I had to do this because amazingly, no department has published its current approach. The information obtained reveals just how much performance management is deteriorating.

All must have prizes

When asked how many staff achieved the top performance rating in each department, it became clear that several departments have more or less entirely abandoned efforts to track performance.

The Home Office, for instance, explained that they had “introduced a no-rating performance management system for delegated grades in 2021 in line with external good practice”. Likewise, at DEFRA, the minister noted that “end-year performance ratings were removed for most staff in April 2023”.

DCMS and MCHLG have both since adopted a “rating-less system” for performance management. The Department for Education explained that they do not “operate a performance management system that includes ratings”, and DWP say their approach “does not involve employees below the Senior Civil Service being assigned a performance rating”. You get the idea.

Others like the Department for Business and Trade were unable to answer because delegated grades in their department are assessed by just two ratings: ‘Met’ and ‘Not Met’.

Meanwhile, at the Treasury, the “high performance category,” defined as “delivering exceptional performance” has limited value, given that nearly a third (30%) of all delegated grades were awarded this rating last year.

Can 30% really be “exceptional”?

Naturally, these “rating-less” departments were unable to answer my question on the number of staff promoted according to their performance marking the previous year.

But even where departments had retained some form of rating system, these marks had apparently no bearing on promotion decisions. And that’s supposed to be the point: money and promotion should follow appraisal and performance management.

But that’s not happening. At the Department for Business and Trade for instance, having ‘Not Met’ as your rating puts you in the bottom two per cent of performers in the department. And despite this, two civil servants in that bracket were promoted up a grade the following year.

And of the 576 promotions awarded by DBT in 2024/2025, a third of recipients (194) didn’t have a performance rating in the previous year.

Similarly, at the Department for Transport there were at least six people whose performance was rated as ‘developing’ (the euphemistic bottom ranking) who were still awarded a promotion. While for 81 of the 282 who were awarded that year, there was no performance rating from the previous year on record.

No one expects… the Spanish Archer?

OK, so if we aren’t managing for high performance, are we at least managing out the real duffers?

Another question I asked was on the number of poor performance cases recorded, and the number of staff who had left as a result.

The best data is provided by the Department for Transport. Across its core department and its agencies, there were over 100,000 performance reviews conducted in 2024/25, with 822 of these leading to unsatisfactory performance ratings. A separate question on the number of concluded cases disciplinary or performance related cases, revealed that there had been 58 ‘Managing Poor Performance’ cases concluded in that year, with only 2 dismissals as a result of poor performance (0.01% of the FTE proportion).

To put this in perspective, there were 25 civil servants who died in service in the department in the same period. So you are twelve times more likely to die than be removed for poor performance.

Sadly, this pattern is replicated across departments: a tiny proportion of civil servants fall into the lowest performance category or are subject to formal performance management procedures, and very few of these cases result in dismissal.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, for instance, has recorded just 61 formal performance cases over the past five years. Of these, 11 employees were either dismissed or resigned, representing roughly 1 per cent of its headcount over that period.

Similarly, at the Treasury, 2,057 reviews were completed in 2024/25, with only 28 poor-performance markings recorded. The department is unable to specify precisely how many of those individuals were dismissed, on the grounds that the number is so small it would risk breaching data protection rules. We do know though, that in no year since 2020 have more than five staff been dismissed for poor performance. The Treasury generally attracts high-flyers, but still.

Neither DHSC nor DfE could provide data on the number of dismissals as a result of poor performance, though in both cases the number of staff who were flagged for poor performance was miniscule.

At DHSC there were 2,820 end-of-year ratings in 2024/25, with fewer than 10 deemed unsatisfactory or below (0.35%). This is a very small risk indeed. For statistical context for every three members of staff given a bad rating, one will die by drowning.

DfE conducted 73,035 “monthly check‑in conversations” in 2024/25, where under performance was recorded in only 516 of these (0.7%).

An honourable mention must also go to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulation Agency (MHRA), where despite 1,272 performance reviews taking place last year, not a single staff member was dismissed for poor performance. In fact, not a single member of staff has been dismissed for poor performance in the last five years in an organisation employing 1,456 FTE staff.

From PQ 87060 - https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-10-31/87060

Sacking long term staff is hard. The easiest time to move out someone who isn’t working out is when they are still on probation.

But to my questions about the number of staff who did not retain their employment following their probation - or had their probation extended - there was a similar story.

For DSIT, “dismissals in relation to probation failure since DSIT’s inception occurred during years 2023-25 and totalled 2 members of staff.” From 2023-2025, there were 1520 entrants to the Civil Service who joined this department.

The Department for Transport revealed that they recorded “fewer than five staff members who were recruited into the Civil Service and did not pass their probation, and were subsequently dismissed, since DBT was created in 2023”. The Department saw 2540 staff recruited into the Civil Service in this time.

DESNZ revealed that no-one had failed probation. There “is no evidence in the data held in the DESNZ HR Oracle system of any employee being dismissed during their probationary period.” This is despite the fact that there have been 840 entrants to the Civil Service who joined this department since its creation in 2023.

Manage your way out of this

So why are these numbers so low? In large part, it’s down to the lengthy and complex procedures that managers must navigate before anyone can be dismissed for poor performance.

Obtained via FOI, the Department for Business and Trade’s dismissal policy sets out a 10-step process, requiring a determined manager to pursue the cause through two written warnings, four formal meetings, and “regular performance discussions” during this period.

Meanwhile, the Home Office provided a flow chart of their dismissal procedure (which was shared by several other departments), illustrating the hoops managers must jump through to dismiss an underperforming colleague.

To make things harder still appeals can be lodged at pretty much every stage of the process. Guidance from DBT dictates that an employee “has a right to one appeal per stage of the procedure”, which are the first written warning, the final written warning, and the decision.

And yet despite all these opportunities to appeal a decision, DBT was subject to nine unfair dismissal claims between 2023 and 2025, while civil service statistics show that there were only 60 dismissals in total over the same period.

Given the time and workload required to navigate this process, and the risk that any decision could be overturned by an appeal or subsequent legal action, many managers conclude that it is simply not worth attempting to remove underperforming staff.

It makes you sick

I always think the amount of time people have off sick is (other things equal) quite a good proxy for morale and performance management. And when we look at the data we can see both the attempt to get a grip after 2010 and the way that petered out before the pandemic and started to backslide after it. (This data excludes the effect of Covid absences).

If we look by department, it is not obvious why the number of days lost to sickness is so much higher in some departments than others. Sure, there are differences in structure which matter - DWP and Justice have far more frontline staff included in their totals. But it is not obvious why the Home Office should be so much higher than say the Cabinet Office, or why the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted should have 50% more sick days than its equivalent in England. We can see absence is higher in lower grades, among women and older staff, but it is not obvious that composition explains away much of these differences.

There is an overlap between sickness and longer term disability. I found that among staff who have declared their disability status:

• 24% of DWP staff identify as disabled (based on 92% declaration rate).

• 19% of DEFRA staff identify as disabled (84% declaration rate)

• 18% of MOJ staff identify as disabled (81% declaration rate).

And there’s also a feedback loop between registering as sick and the difficulty of sacking people.

When threatened with the sack people say they are disabled and claim discrimination under the Equality Act.

• Between 2020 and 2025, 607 Employment Tribunal claims were lodged against the MOJ under the Equality Act (the majority relating to disability) and 244 claims were lodged for unfair dismissal.

• DWP has seen 413 claims lodged against the department between 2022 and 2025. Of these, 312 relate to the Equality Act only.

• The Home Office has had 205 Employment Tribunal claims in the last 5 years (01/10/2021 to 30/09/2025). (It has refused to break this down)

• The MOD has had 187 claims lodged against it since 2020, including 134 under the EA. Equality Act claims have risen consistently from 4 in 2020-2021, to 39 in the current year up to November.

Conclusion

Fourteen years on from Maude’s report, the Civil Service appears to be backsliding on the challenges he identified. The Conservatives have promised to reduce Civil Service numbers by 132,000 (back to 2016 levels) saving £8 billion. But this can only be the start of an overhaul.

Today top performers still go largely unrecognised, and promotions do not rely on performance. Meanwhile poor performance is hardly registered, and when it is, the levers to dismiss staff on this basis are effectively out of reach. The losers from this are the public, taxpayers - and the civil servants who are not getting the rewards they deserve and carrying people they shouldn’t have to.

Taxpayers have a right to expect a more efficient and better run Civil Service, and that is what we need to deliver.

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“Real wages have risen by more in the first 18 months of this Labour Government than in the first 10 years of the Tory Government.”

Keen observers will immediately spot what is going on here.

Ten years on from 2010 is… 2020, and the depths of a global pandemic.

So if we do a point to point comparison then… well, you can tell exactly what she is up to here.

Let’s look at the chart. Reeves “ten years” comparison (in pink below) neatly coincides with the mid-pandemic low point. If you compared just a few more months on into the recovery (say “eleven” years) the story would be totally different. As would rolling on to 2024 (in grey). Hence her selection of “ten years”.

In reality neither 2010 or 2020 mark turning points in the wages data.

The coalition government came to power about halfway through the big fall in earnings that followed the massive recession. Following bubbly financial sector growth from 2000-2008, real wages were falling fast way before Cameron and Clegg ever set foot in the rose garden. The economic turning points were March 2008 and 2013-14 ish, but then those don’t fit the political narrative Reeves wants to weave.

On this data, the trend between 2014 and 2024 and the trend between 2024 and 2026 are basically indistinguishable.

But it’s also worth also understanding what this measure she is quoting actually is. “Average Weekly Earnings” sounds like the wages of the average Joe. Nope!

It is an economic concept measuring all earnings divided by all employees. Its main merit for economists is that it can be produced quickly.

But it tells you little about what is happening to most people. If a few bankers make out like bandits, but your average person sees no increase, it will still go up.

And if unemployment falls and there are more employees, what tends to happen is that the people joining the workforce (from welfare or because they are young) tend to have lower earnings and drag the average down (the so-called “batting average” effect). It doesn’t distinguish part and full time jobs. If more part time women enter work (say because of welfare reform) that will drag down the average.

So, let’s look at some other measures of earnings that actually try to get at the experiences of normal people. The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is the flagship ONS measure, with a huge sample size. It lets you look at different people, not just an economic variable.

I have given index values below so you can see the relative trends. You can see that it was lower earners who took a bigger hit in the period from 2008-2010, and that people in the lower half of the income distribution saw stronger growth after that - something that Reeves didn’t mention for some reason.

And of course, what really matters is how much you actually have after tax. While Reeves is clobbering lower earners with large tax increases, the previous government oversaw an unprecedented increase in the personal tax allowance from £6,500 to over £12,000, further boosting the take home pay of lower earners on top of the increase shown above.

And the statistics above still don’t capture the batting average effect.

Before the election we had seen real wages growing since 2014 - and there has relatively been little difference since.

The difference was that wages were rising even as we brought more and more people into the labour market, but now that is over, with HMRC data (which starts in 2014) suggesting employment is now falling.

For all of Reeves dishonest attempt to pretend there has been some great acceleration in wage growth, her statistic ignores the fact that for many people, their wage growth is now zero, because they don’t have a job.

This is particularly true for young people.

The wage growth we saw under the last government was happening even as lots of young people (who have lower wages) left unemployment and joined the workforce.

They almost certainly dragged “average” wage growth down through a batting-average effect, but in the real world them getting a job was a good thing/

Now the reverse is true, and we should remember that wage growth is currently being flattered by the fact that lots of young people are no longer in the data because they can’t get a job. Amazingly, youth unemployment in the UK is now higher than in the eurozone, where rigid labour markets have long led to high youth unemployment.

Why? We all know. By targeting her biggest tax increase on low paid workers and jacking up labour market regulation at the same time, Reeves has brought Europe’s youth unemployment disaster across the Channel.

Conclusion

This is a nonsense stat from Reeves, and most people will immediately understand why.

It is a bit like when Labour MP Tris Osborne says ‘unemployment was higher on average under the Conservatives’. It is technically true, but extraordinarily misleading.

Wages took a massive hammer blow from the 2008 recession, and that went on for a long time - but Reeves wants to count that as a failure of the coalition government.

Of course we would like wages to grow faster, but there has been ongoing real growth since 2013-14 ish, which is all the more surprising given the massive blows from the 2020 global pandemic and 2022 Ukraine/energy crisis.

And there are a lot of things about the recent history of earnings growth that are not widely understood, and really don’t fit Reeves’ political narrative.

If I were Reeves I would be doing less boasting about the UK labour market right now - and more to fix the unemployment problem.

Postscript - HMT have messed up.

The government didn’t publish the usual Red Book alongside the Spring Statement but they did publish a web page giving sources for some of the things she said.

Confusingly, this says the Chancellor said something different to what she actually said, something which is not correct on any reading. (If you work at the Treasury and are reading this you need to change your website.)

I don’t know whether officials have been arguing the toss with the Chancellor or whether there was a last-minute change of plan but the Treasury website says the Chancellor said thirteen years. I checked the video back, and she definitely said ten.

If we go into the dataset that the Treasury have linked to it is not the case that real wages only grew £5 over thirteen years. That’s just wrong.

Whoops. HMT, please correct!

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As most readers of this blog will know, spending on SEND has gone up pretty dramatically over recent years, including under the Conservative government, following the Children and Families Act 2014.

The goal of the SEND plan is to start to bring that spending under control.

That is not at all a bad thing to do in principle, but the question is how to do this in such a way that children who really do need extra support don’t lose out - and that we don’t just create more problems further down the line.

I’ve seen this first hand. One of our two children has benefitted from some help with a really wonderful SENCO and it has been hugely valuable. And there are other people who are much more needy than us.

Saving money… but only in the next Parliament

The core of how the plan will save money is that the government will amend the law to restrict access to Education, Health and Care plans (EHCPs), which set out what extra help children with special needs are entitled to. Only the “most complex needs” will get education, health and care plans (EHCPs) by 2035. But the difficult measures to restrict EHCPs don’t start until 2029, coincidentally the year of the next General Election. Funny that.

Things will get more expensive till then.

The DfE estimates that the percentage of pupils with an EHCP will continue to rise initially - from 5.3 per cent in 2024-25 to 7.7 per cent in 2029-30 - before dropping to 4.7 per cent by 2034-35.

They have published a document supposedly setting out how they arrived at these numbers. But there is no methodology I can see. The document does say that “by 2035, 15-20% of pupils will have an Individual Support Plan” and that the proportion of pupils in special schools will fall from 2.5% to 2.2% over the next Parliament. But it is not at all clear how they have arrived at any of these numbers, or how much money this is intended to save.

What’s clear is that all the action in terms of saving money is being pushed into the next parliament. The nice stuff is now, the hard stuff after the election.

This raises a massive question about the DFE’s finances before then. Regular readers will remember that Rachel Reeves left DFE holding the baby for £6 billion of funding pressures which are to be transferred from local authorities to the DFE.

As the OBR has noted:

“the Government has announced that from 2028-29 the cost of SEND provision will be fully absorbed within the existing RDEL envelope. The Government has not set out any specific plans on how this pressure, which we estimate at £6 billion in 2028-29, would be accommodated within the existing RDEL envelope. If it were fully funded within the Department for Education’s £69 billion RDEL core schools budget in 2028-29, this would imply a 4.9 per cent real fall in mainstream school spending per pupil rather than the 0.5 per cent real increase planned by Government.” (OBR EFO Nov 2025, p122)

We now know the government isn’t really planning to save money by 2028-29.

The DFE are going to get £3.5 billion extra in 28/29, reopening their Spending Review settlement - but that is offset by the existing £6 billion pressure they previously got. So there is a £2.5 billion funding gap.

DFE could hope that spending on more mainstream provision for send now might reduce LA pressures, but that is a bit of a punt.

So where is the money coming from? We shall have to see how the numbers stack up.

A blank cheque?

The government says that there will be individual support plans (ISPs) covering a broader group than EHCPs. The goal here is to control spending by shifting numbers from EHCPs to ISPs. But how much will be available to fund these ISPs? We won’t find out until 2028 or 2029, after the legislation is passed.

Government is planning to create “approximately” seven different packages of support. It says that some will be mapped on to familiar descriptions of complex SEND, while others will support a group of children with different or no diagnosis but who require similar support. But these specialist provision packages - and the funding bands associated - will only be published by 2028.

A key detail is the funding cap on all these packages - if the caps are set too low, it will simply be impossible to fund the work that is supposed to be done. The DfE had already announced that independent special schools will be subject to national price bands, in a government clampdown on “spiralling” fees. If these are set too low it will simply destroy independent special schools which are looking after some of the most severely disabled children. But TES reports that we won’t see these funding rates until 2029 (potentially after the next election). The National Association of Special Schools has made this point about a blank cheque:

banded funding and capped prices will be in place for all special school and specialist college placements. In the absence of any sense of how these categories will be constructed, nor of the funding that will be attached to them, schools and families are given a headline message that will leave them anxious about whether special schools will be able to afford to provide the support that they know is transformative for children.

As well as driving down the number of pupils with an EHCP, the other way the reforms will saving money is to water down the EHCP.

If parents feel they have been unfairly denied an EHCP, they will still be able to appeal to a tribunal. But unlike under the current system, the tribunal will not be allowed to demand that local authorities send a child to a particular school, giving councils far more control over where SEND children are educated. This will probably save money - but the politics of this will be very hard after 2029: parents won’t get the support they want or may be offered something far away from home.

Those receiving the most specialist support will be entitled to an EHCP. But the way these are issued will also change - and in a way that is not clear at the moment. A child’s provision will be agreed before an EHCP is issued. This provision will be based on a “statutory entitlement” outlined in what the government are calling a “specialist provision package”. The council will then issue an EHCP, while the school will issue a more detailed IPS. So what exactly is the EHCP actually doing in this new system? I heard one Labour MP say today that children don’t always get the support promised in an EHCP. Okay, but won’t that be more likely to happen if their legal weight is watered down? Isn’t that in fact… the point of what the government is doing?

The basic issue is this: the government is going to ask MPs to vote for a completely new system, but almost all of the important details of it will only be agreed after that legislation is passed. So we are being asked to sign a blank cheque.

More to do for schools

The white paper proposes a new system of tiered support. Individual schools will be asked to do quite a lot more themselves.

The teaching unions have said the resources the government are offering to do all this work within schools is not enough. The NEU say:

“it is too small. It only equates to a part-time teaching assistant for the average primary school and two teaching assistants for average secondary schools. This is not enough to make schools more inclusive.“

The NASUWT teaching union says:

“this new funding is barely a drop in the bucket of the investment necessary to drive real improvement in schools.”

Some heads are making the same point. Katie Barry, headteacher at St George’s Church of England Community Primary School in Lincolnshire, tells Tes that “the move away from EHCPs towards school-led plans raises my concerns about potential increased pressure on already stretched mainstream schools”.

This new proposed system does seem to be loading a lot more work and bureaucracy onto individual schools. Will they actually be able to cope?

In addition the government have a plan to reassess the need for extra help when children transition from primary to secondary and to sixth form - this sounds reasonable in principle, but the danger is that it creates a lot of friction and cost for no real savings - in many cases parents will be re-fighting battles for support that they have just been through, and that the process costs more than it saves.

The schools white paper

The schools white paper is full of micro-announcements and new targets - some of which are fine. There is a plan to change the funding formula which I will have to come back to.

There are a couple of things in there that are concerning though. There is a big push for “inclusion” rather than suspension or expulsion of children who don’t misbehave - there is so much ideology pushing in this direction already, and I worry that it means more disruption and danger to kids and teachers doing the right thing.

Questions we need answers to

1. What does this plan mean for mainstream school funding, and what’s happening with the rest (the other £2.5bn) of the £6 billion pressure?

2. How are MPs supposed to reassure themselves they aren’t signing a blank cheque, given the lack of detail on what will replace the current system, and what funding rates will be?

3. Why are funding rates only being set out in 2029?

4. Why is the government able to give quite precise numbers on how many children will have an EHCP in future, but not any real methodology on how it arrived at these numbers?

5. Are teaching unions and heads wrong to say that the resources aren’t enough for mainstream schools to do all the extra work that is proposed?

Further reading

TES: How is Labour planning to reform SEND?

TES: Schools White Paper: the sector reacts

Schools Week: Schools white paper: What is happening to EHCPs under SEND reforms?

NASS: NASS warns SEND reforms erode rights and let costs dictate

Guardian: Fewer children in England to get EHCPs by 2035 under Send overhaul.

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This is the third in a series of posts on welfare reform. Part one, on the growth of spending is here, and part two, on the growth of large claims, is here.

By the end of this Parliament Britain will be spending £177 billion on working age welfare, up from £97 billion in 2020. Where is it all going?

I mean, like, physically where in the country?

DWP does not make it easy to see where benefit spending is going.

So in this post I have pulled out data and calculated spending on each of the largest working age benefits - Universal Credit, and working age spending on Housing Benefit, Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Personal Independence Payments (PIP)1.

Putting these together lets us make a kind of welfare atlas of Britain.

There are other benefits, so our map doesn’t capture all working age spending.

But I have about £119 billion of spending in the map below, and overall DWP says spending on people of working age and children was just under £140 billion in 2024/252. So it is not perfect, but should be a reasonable approximation3.

Let’s start by looking at local authorities, then we’ll zoom in further.

Local authorities

You can see immediately that welfare spending is intensely concentrated in urban areas. Spend per working age person is nearly three times higher in places like Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham than it is in some of the home counties and affluent east midlands.

Even though we aren’t looking at all welfare spending here, the spend in the large urban authorities is huge - there are several local authorities in the billion-pounds-a-year club or just outside:

And these are individual local authorities. “Manchester” in the chart above is just the city centre - Greater Manchester is actually £6.3 billion.

West Yorkshire gets £4.7 billion, Merseyside £3.6 billion and West Midlands Combined Authority a cool £7.1 billion.

Given that these numbers are an underestimate because I haven’t included all the small fiddly benefits, the total spend is likely to be more more like £3.9 billion in Birmingham now.

And given the expected growth, that is likely to rise to just under £5 billion by the start of the next parliament. Even somewhere like Bradford (which isn’t that big) will be approaching £2 billion a year. This is serious money.

Opportunity costs

And that brings me to the point of this post. Why should you care, beyond curiosity? Two reasons.

First, thinking about the sums going to particular places helps us think about the opportunity costs of welfare spending.

The other day Number 10 briefed out that following their defeat by Labour backbenchers they will not be making any further attempt at welfare reform in the near future. So the bills will keep on rising, to £177 billion a year and beyond.

But these national numbers are so large they are hard to get your head around.

It’s easier to think about what a billion quid a year could potentially do to boost growth and opportunity in some of the places above. You could have tax breaks to get big investors into County Durham and Sheffield. London Boroughs like Enfield, Brent and Newham have 50-60 thousand pupils in their schools. They could have class sizes of two or three. With £15 billion over a decade Leeds could finally build its tram without requiring any Whitehall approval. (The tram was recently cancelled by central government for the umpteenth time).

As part of Starmer’s latest relaunch, No.10 briefed out the other day that they would “pump billions” into poorer areas. The truth is government already does “pump billions” into poor places. It’s just in a form (benefit spending) that has not revived their underlying economies.

The second reason I think this data is interesting is to think about how and why welfare dependence can be so much higher in some places than others. The differences with a city or a neighbourhood can be huge.

So let’s zoom in more and look at that.

The constituency level

Sadly, because Scotland doesn’t produce data on its newly devolved benefits below the level of the local authority, we will have to home in on just England and Wales in order to have a fair comparison.

At this level we can see that while Sheffield may have high benefit spending per head in the map above, The constituency of Sheffield Hallam does not. And while Birmingham has high spending, within the city, Sutton Coldfield constituency doesn’t - and so on.

Again, I think it is useful to think about the opportunity cost at this level too.

Tottenham, Brent East and Birmingham Ladywood receive half a billion pounds a year from these benefits alone. What could you do to revive such a small area with half a billion a year? And there are lots of other constituencies in the £400-£500m a year range

It’s also interesting to think about the transfers between places as a result of all this. Tottenham constituency alone gets more than the constituencies of Sheffield Hallam, Wetherby and Easingwold, Harpenden and Berkhamsted, York Outer, Westmorland and Lonsdale, Henley and Thame, and North East Hampshire put together.

Looking at the Constituency level also lets us do some political analysis.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives see a lower share of the vote where welfare spending is higher - and Labour sees a higher share. The Lib Dems have a mix, but they do much better in the middle class areas with low spending. Reform do better where benefit spending is higher. The greens do a bit better in higher welfare areas, while the independents (who were mainly Gaza independents in 2024) did best in areas with high welfare spending:

Neighbourhoods

We can continue to zoom in, but things get harder. Frustratingly, the neighbourhood level data for DLA and Housing Benefit is on a different basis to that for UC and PIP.

So let’s just look at UC and PIP spending.

Here’s London. Again, note that the variation between places has gone up - because we’re looking at smaller areas. People used to talk about living on the “wrong side of the tracks”. Well, the river Lea in north London marks a sharp boundary between two very different social worlds when it comes to welfare.

People in Enfield, Edmonton, Tottenham and Stamford Hill are claiming easily twice as much as people on the other side of the river in Woodford, Chingford and Loughton.

Why does this matter? It shows the limits of access to jobs as an explanation for social differences. These are people are living in the side by side same city with pretty similar access to jobs, but in very different social worlds. While access to opportunity and good jobs is part of the story about high welfare claims in some places, these massive variations show that there is a lot more going on too.

There are, of course, multiple dimensions to what’s going on here. Education, housing, employment patterns and so on. One dimension is ethnicity. The two patches of higher welfare claims north of the Thames in the map above coincide with two areas with a higher black population. And the same is true in Lewisham. But then that correlation is less pronounced in Southwark and Lambeth, so there’s more going on than just ethnicity.

In the 1980s there was a lot of discussion about the “inner cities”. One thing that is notable is that the very centres of our largest cities are now not where you find high welfare spending.

Over recent decades there has been resurgence in the very centres of our large cities with young professionals and some students moving in. But this revival has not extended very far outside the very centres of the city, and the welfare map shows this.

Here is just UC spend per working age person in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. As you can see, the very centres of the cities are lighter - the darker green areas indicate larger benefit payments per head. Payments in the very centres are less than £50 per head, but immediately outside the centre it is more like £200 per working age person.

So you can see that our city renaissance doesn’t go far beyond the city centres. 10 minutes out from the centres people are claiming a lot of benefits. It is different for smaller cities which have seen less revival - for example, Bradford has large payments in the very centre too.

Conclusions

Before coming to office in 1997 Tony Blair promised to cut what he called “the bills of social failure” - and while the welfare bill actually went up on his watch, at least his argument was right - taxpayers’ money that you are spending mopping up problems is money you aren’t spending on preventing those problems.

Obviously we can’t just overnight shift all of the large bill for working age welfare into more productive uses. But over time we need to control welfare spending if we want to have the money for other things that can get the economy moving.

I have written before about getting growth going in poorer places and spreading opportunity. People sometimes moan about poor places receiving lots of taxpayers’ money - but the truth is that that money often comes in a form (welfare) that doesn’t help change their trajectory. It may even compound it in some cases.

The Starmer government is showing how limited the room is for tax increases, with the economy sagging most in the sectors hit by the biggest tax hikes. More tax increases will be counterproductive. So if we want the firepower to fix broken places, we need to look to control spending instead. If we could cut the ever-growing welfare bill then maybe we could get somewhere.

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The Household Benefit Cap was introduced in 2013. It was one of a suite of measures taken by the last Conservative government to rein in welfare spending. The idea is that benefit claimants who could be working should not be able to get more in benefits than someone similar can earn by working.

But, because the cap was quite a controversial idea at the time, the idea of “someone who could be working” is baked into the design of the cap in a very generous way.

• First, the household is exempted from the cap if someone in the household gets one of 16 exempting benefits. (I have put the list at the bottom). So, for example, if your child gets DLA, or your partner gets PIP, then the whole family is exempt from the cap. (A different design would have been to exclude those benefits from the calculation, rather than triggering a blanket exemption).

• Second, if you have been in work for more than 12 months there is a “grace period” of 9 months before the cap kicks in.

• Third, You are exempt if the family (in total) earns £722 a month (£8,664 a year) or someone in it works more than 16 hours.

As of the middle of last year, just under 120,000 households have their benefits capped. But how many are exempted from the cap?

Sadly, on that question - and all other aspects of the cap - the government is refusing to answer our Parliamentary questions:

• How many people get more than the cap? The government won’t say.

• How many people are exempted from the cap as a result of each exemption? The government won’t say.

• How many people are exempted from the cap because they earn enough? The government won’t say.

• How many people leave the benefit cap for different reasons? The government won’t say.

• How many people are in the grace period? The government won’t say.

• How many people will become subject to the Household Benefit Cap following the removal of the two-child limit? The government won’t say.

You get the general idea. They are being distinctly non-forthcoming.

Obviously they have the data, but they claim it is “too expensive” to work it out.

The government does publish the numbers flowing on and off the cap. But they do not provide a meaningful breakdown of these flows, never mind the levels.

All we can see is that just 8% of people who did flow off the cap in the first half of 2025 did so because their earnings rose to exempt them. Whether the other 92% leavers started claiming fewer benefits or (I suspect) got themselves onto an exempting benefit we cannot say from the published data - and when asked, the government is… (you guessed it) refusing to answer.

So... how many households are claiming more than the cap?

In the face of the government’s stonewalling, we are forced into some vigilante statistical analysis.

If we use the published data from the long-running Family Resources Survey (FRS) we can look at the total amount of benefits claimed by non-pensioner families, and compare that to the cap level for that kind of family.

Crucially the word “family” has a special meaning in DWP stats - the technical term they use is “benefit units”. That’s because a “household” can contain “multiple benefit units”, whereas a benefit unit is the specific group of people (claimant, partner, and dependent children) whose income and circumstances are assessed together for a single benefit claim. If grandparents live with a nuclear family, they will likely be in a different “benefit unit”.

If we look at all state support, then there are 1.9 million non-pensioner benefit units getting more than the benefit cap for that household type.

This is not the same as the number who are currently using one of the exemptions to the cap as currently designed - as it is not even supposed to cover some of these benefits. Still, this gives some sense of the number of families getting larger benefit payments.

While an overestimate in one way, it is an underestimate in another - the Family Resources Survey is known to undercount benefit receipts as people forget what they have had. Just under a fifth of actual spending doesn’t show up in the FRS.1

So how much are the exemptions costing taxpayers?

The government does publish how much the cap reduces the incomes of those currently affected, and with 124,000 households having their benefits reduced by a mean average of £256 a month that implies that in a static sense (even ignoring incentive effects) the current cap is saving taxpayers about £380m a year.

A policy that would bring the much wider number of families claiming larger amounts into scope would potentially save a lot more.

Households

Now let’s flip and look at “households” in the normal meaning of the word. Particularly where people have extended families, there can be several “benefit units” in a household.

The chart below is in real terms - but as you can see, even after you strip out the impact of inflation, the number of working age2 households getting large sums is going up.

The number of big claims rose in the Blair years, stabilised after the introduction of the benefit cap and other reforms, but has started to increase again more recently.

The FRS data is quite laggy - but I suspect that we will see that rising trend is (at the very least) continuing. It is more likely to increase as the impact of things like the end of the two child cap and other measures kick in.

Those exempting benefits - particularly sickness and disability benefits - have seen large increases in the numbers claiming, and these increases are forecast to accelerate.

For example, the numbers on DLA/PIP rose from 3.2m in 2010/11 to 4.4m in 2023/4, the last year of the chart above. But more to the point DWP forecast numbers to 6.7m by 2030/31, which will continue to erode the scope of the Household Benefit Cap.

The current setup and exemptions strongly incentivise people to get onto one of the exempting benefits.

I am very struck that where people are particularly likely to have large claims (expensive central London) we see that a greater share of UC claimants are claiming the health element. This is striking because in general London has a smaller share of UC claimants on the health element (because the population is much younger). You can see that as the dark blue blob in the middle of London below. This seeming anomaly may be a reaction to the household benefit cap.

You think this is too cynical? I’m afraid people always learn to work the system and how to answer questions to claim successfully - indeed for a small fee there are various websites that will tell you how to do this.

That, in combination with a relentless series of legal challenges by activist groups tend over time to weaken controls on spending.

The history of incapacity benefits is a good example of this tendency. Over the last 15 years we have gone from less than 10% being put into the highest payment category to 80% getting it - shown in dark orange below:

Conclusion - we need to restart welfare reform

Is welfare reform impossible? No - under the last Conservative government we did control spending, and up to the pandemic spending on working age welfare fell in real terms - the only sustained period in which this has been true in my lifetime. Welfare spending didn’t return to the level of 2012/13 until 2024/25.

But to do this we needed to reform on all fronts. We slowed benefit uprating, tightened caps on housing benefit spending, reformed incapacity benefits, extended conditionality, (including through Universal Credit, which asked non-working spouses of claimants to work for the first time), we cut the spare room subsidy, and introduced the two-child benefit cap. Under Starmer this is being dropped or eroded away, and so the bill is forecast to rise in real terms by nearly £20bn a year over this parliament - roughly as much as we spend on the police in England.

The Household Benefit Cap is only one part of the picture obviously. We need to fundamentally reform sickness and disability benefits - indeed last year Number 10 were making the case for this, but folded at the first sign of unrest from Labour MPs.

We must restart the process of welfare reform - we can’t afford not to. And that has to include the Household Benefit Cap.

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Annex: The Exempting Benefits

You’re also not affected by the cap if you, your partner or any children under 18 living with you gets:

• Adult Disability Payment (ADP)

• Armed Forces Compensation Scheme

• Armed Forces Independence Payment

• Attendance Allowance

• Carer’s Allowance

• Carer Support Payment

• Child Disability Payment

• Disability Living Allowance (DLA)

• Employment and Support Allowance (if you get the support component)

• Guardian’s Allowance

• Industrial Injuries Benefits (and equivalent payments as part of a War Disablement Pension or the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme)

• Pension Age Disability Payment

• Personal Independence Payment (PIP)

• Scottish Adult Disability Living Allowance (SADLA)

• War pensions

• War Widow’s or War Widower’s Pension

In fact, over the 5 years from 2025/26 to 2029/30, the government is now planning to spend £36.4 billion more on benefits than they had planned to only a few months earlier.

The difference is shown in the chart below as the little grey gap.

But it isn’t really that little. Spending in 2029/30 alone is now predicted to be nine and a half billion a year higher than it was in the spring forecast. That’s a lot of extra taxpayers’ money over just a couple of months. Overall, between Spring Statement on 26 March and Budget on 26 November, Reeves lost about £150m a day.

What’s going on? It’s not just revolting Labour MPs.

By 2030/31 working age welfare will cost £177.5 billion a year, or about a billion pounds every two days. For context, we spend about £20 billion a year on the police in England and Wales, and about £15 billion a year on NHS GPs in England. While in real terms spending on welfare was roughly the same in 2024 as in 2012, the projected growth is a real terms (i.e. faster than inflation) increase.

Stripping out inflation, in today’s money, spending will have increased by £15.6 billion over the five years from 2025/26 to 2030/31.

This growth in spending partly reflects policy choices like the defeat of benefit reforms by Labour MPs and the ending of the two-child benefit cap (though “choice” is a funny word for two things Starmer used to oppose).

But it also reflects rising levels of worklessness and wider deterioration in the forecasts. The OBR explains that working age welfare is being driven up by:

Higher benefit uprating, which increases spending by £3.1 billion in 2029-30. Roughly half (£1.6 billion) is explained by higher CPI uprating for working-age benefits, with the rest mostly due to higher earnings increasing triple lock uprating for pensions (£1.4 billion).

Higher unemployment in the first half of the forecast period, which increases universal credit spending by £1.8 and £1.2 billion in 2026-27 and 2027-28, before tapering off to a £0.5 billion increase in 2029-30.

Higher disability caseloads and average awards, which increase spending by £1.4 billion in 2029-30. Most of this is driven by lower exit rates from PIP and attendance allowance (£0.9 billion), which the latest DWP data shows have fallen substantially since the onset of the pandemic.[]

Policy measures, which increase spending by £9 billion in 2029-30. These include the reversal of the tightened gateway for PIP at Spring Statement 2025 and the extension of winter fuel payment eligibility announced in the summer, which increase spending by £4.0 billion and £1.7 billion respectively. They also include the removal of the two-child limit, costing £3.1 billion.

These changes - higher benefits multiplied by more people claiming them - are spread across different benefits. There are five main benefits where most of the unexpected and increased spending is concentrated:

What’s driving all this growth in spending?

In future posts I will come back to the reasons why we are seeing more people on benefits, and growing claim amounts from people on benefits. The short answer is a combination of:

1. A labour market reeling from higher taxes and more regulation,

2. A series of benefits where people have learned how to play the system, (“system learning” in the jargon) and people have become more likely to seek a claim,

3. The growth of mental health claims, particularly among younger people.

In this post I am not going to get too into the detail of these three drivers, except to say that they overlap and combine. But here are some examples of what I mean.

On the first - the economic outlook - I’m particularly struck by the increase in youth unemployment, which is now above Euro area levels for the first time in a long time.

These days, now that Jobseekers allowance is a thing of the past, the impact of rising unemployment shows up in terms of increased numbers expected on Universal Credit (shown in the chart below). But a worsening economy also drives up numbers of claimants of other benefits too. By the end of the forecast there are over 700,000 more people claiming those five benefits I mentioned above, compared to what the government expected in spring 2025.

On “system learning” and increased willingness to claim, you can see that cleanly by looking at the explosive growth of DLA for children, which is now forecast to rise past a million claimants and hit eight billion in spending.

These aren’t people who are looking for jobs (because they are children) so we can see this growth in the numbers claiming isn’t just about a worsening economy.

And what is driving that rise in numbers and spending on Child DLA? We can see what people are claiming for when they come to the end of Child DLA at 16 and have to seek mandatory reconsideration if they want to stay on benefits. We can see how mental health conditions have been driving the increase:

Conclusions

I have made the case before that the choices facing Britain are going to get a lot tougher because of the ageing society.

The kinds of numbers I have included above are pretty stark. But these trends are not inevitable. As we have seen before, welfare design and wider economic policy can make a huge difference. What goes up can come down, and vice versa.

And if we want to have the money to spend on things like health, without self-defeating tax hikes that would simply damage the economy, then we are going to have to deal with the ballooning bill for working age welfare spending.

That is not going to be easy, and right now things are going the wrong way under Reeves really fast.

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PS - And another thing!

In one way the statistics above don’t capture the full extent of spending and subsidy, on working age benefits, because the figures above are net of subsidies for social housing. Those subsidies are pretty big - particularly in London, where about a quarter of households are in social housing.

The gap between private and social (council house) rents has got bigger over recent years so the implicit subsidy is greater. 83% of households in new social lettings last year received some form of housing-related benefit, so this subsidy mainly shows up in the form of apparently lower (measured) benefit spending. One recent attempt to cost out the total value of the subsidy from lower social sector rents put it at just under £20 billion a year for general needs (i.e. non-sheltered) social housing, concentrated in places like London.

OK, I’ll stop now.

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Partly for the soaring pictures of Teesdale in the snow and the Vaughan Williams soundtrack… But mainly just for the incredible resilience and stoicism of the farmers, making a living in extraordinary circumstances.

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