Labour set out rules that anything which should be released under Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation should be released in answer to a Parliamentary Question.

But again and again they break their own rules and promises. They refuse to answer a question in Parliament, are forced to under FOI law.

But we have been keeping the receipts - particularly my colleague Sheridan Westlake.

This arrogant approach isn’t just treating Parliament and MPs with contempt. It undermines good government and the basic point of democracy. Sunlight is a good disinfectant. An open government is more likely to learn from mistakes than one which covers them up. Corruption, rule breaking and dodgy decisions are less likely when everyone can see what’s going on.

Ironically, the government has passed the “Hillsborough Law” with a “duty of candour” for public officials. But their behaviour towards Parliament and transparency shows that they think they are above their own laws - clearly the new law is only supposed to apply to the little people - not grand Labour ministers.

Let me show you what I mean.

“As open as possible”

Section 1.6(d) of the Ministerial Code states:

“d. Ministerial office requires candour and openness. Ministers should demand and welcome candid advice. They should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Ministers breach this every day now. Far from being “as open as possible” they are refusing to answer questions any previous government would have answered. Here are some of the ways:

1. You ask for information, Ministers say they have “no plans” to publish it

When asked to publish specific documents, Ministers simply reply there are “no plans” to publish such documents. Yes, the whole point is that we are asking you to publish them!

No attempt is given to provide a rationale or public interest justification, as required by the Ministerial Code. Some examples:

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the guidance issued to departments referenced in the letter from the Paymaster General to the Institute for Government of 14 October 2025.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: There are no plans to publish this guidance.”

Sure, but that wasn’t the question we asked.

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the Government Communications Service Inclusive communications template.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: There are currently no plans to publish this template.”

They don’t feel they need to even give a reason:

“Kevin Hollinrake: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the correspondence from the Permanent Secretary to his Department to the Hon Member for Thirsk & Malton of 24 November 2025.

Anna Turley: There are no plans to publish this correspondence.”

Should you be allowed to see if your money is being spent on Labour propaganda? Labour don’t think so:

“Charlie Dewhirst: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the Answer of 21 October 2025 to Question 82673 on Government Departments: Social Media, how much has been spent on the two agencies for influencer work since July 2024.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: There are no plans to publish specific financial details in the public domain.”

2. Information is often refused because they say it is not “routinely” published or is “not subject to external publication” - a term with no meaning

Information is now sometimes denied on the basis that there is no “routine” publication – taking the denials a step further, in requiring regular publication (rather than ad hoc) to justify disclosure to Parliament.

The idea that information can be refused from publication to Parliament because it is not published is a wonderfully circular argument, worthy of Sir Humphrey himself:

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the Model Contract for Senior Civil Servants.

Anna Turley: Contracts for SCS are not published publicly, so we will not be publishing a model contract.”

Another spurious justification that a request for information is “not subject to external publication”. This has no legal basis or meaning whatsoever:

“Mike Wood: To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, if he will place in the Library a copy of any correspondence between his Department and the Commissioner for Public Appointments relating to public appointments without open and fair competition since 1 July 2024.

Justin Madders: Under the Governance Code for Public Appointments there is no requirement to publish correspondence between the Department and the Commissioner for Public Appointments.”

Documents may also be refused because they are supposedly “internal-facing” - again there is no legal basis for this:

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the Civil Service Recruitment Framework.

Anna Turley: The Civil Service Recruitment Framework exists to ensure vacancies are consistently accessible to the widest possible pool of talent. There are no plans to publish this internal-facing framework to the public domain, as it constitutes HR-to-HR guidance designed for departments to integrate into their respective policies and processes.”

When pressed for a copy of a terms of reference of a committee, Ministers refused on the grounds that a Cabinet Office code did not “require” publication. On this basis, no question would ever be answered unless there was a Government Code requiring publication.

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, with reference to the Cabinet Office Annual report and accounts 2024-2025, HC1372, 23 October 2025, if he will publish the terms of reference of the Staff Board.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: The Staff Board serves in an advisory capacity to the Executive Committee and is not a mandatory component of the Corporate Governance Code. Its Terms of Reference are not subject to external publication.”

Asked for a justification, ministers give circular answers: we don’t need to publish it because… well, we just don’t need to publish it.

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the answer of 26 November 2025 to Question 92016 on Civil Service: Management, for what reason the Terms of Reference are not subject to external publication.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: The Corporate governance in central government departments: code of good practice (2017) does not require publication of board and committee Terms of Reference.”

There are some non-answers which would make even sir Humphrey blush:

“Mike Wood: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will place in the Library a copy of the Honours Committees handbook.”

Nick Thomas-Symonds: The Honours Committees handbook is a document used on their appointment to induct independent committee members and chairs to the honours system and the committee process.”

Ministers sometimes just assert that the information “will not be published” or “are not published”. No reason of any kind is given:

“David Simmonds: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the answer of 5 November 2025, to Question 86426, on Asylum: Housing, If she will publish a copy of the pre-procurement documentation sent to potential suppliers of asylum accommodation for the next round of contracts.

Alex Norris: The pre-procurement documentation for the Future Asylum Contract Transformation Project will not be published.”

So much for “as open as possible.”

Breaking their own rules

You can see the extent to which Labour are treating Parliament and voters with total contempt by the way they release information under the Freedom of Information Act which they refuse to give to Parliament.

We have proven this through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. In the requests, we have explicitly cited a Parliament Question refusing to disclose the information, and then asked for that information under FOI. This subsequent release under FOI is contrary to the Government’s own stated position.

The Cabinet Office Guide to Parliamentary Work (November 2024) states:

“Every question should be approached with a predisposition to give relevant information fully. There should be no inconsistencies between the provision of information in answers to written questions and information given under the FOI Act, therefore, if information would be released under FOI, it would also be released in response to a WPQ/QWA.”

The (then) Leader of the House of Commons confirmed this approach in October 2024:

“if information would be released under FOI, it would also be released in response to a WPQ”.

And yet again and again and again this thing that should supposedly never happen is happening. There are zillions of examples, but here are 26 for starters - one for each letter of the alphabet:

A) Special adviser training / induction manual

Original refusal: Hansard, 29 October 2024, PQ10436, - saying “no plans” to publish (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2024/14571 (this was a multi-part FOI response) on 17 December 2024.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 21 January 2025, PQ23470, (link).

B) No10 Travel Expenses guidance

Original refusal: Hansard, 27 November 2024, PQ14976, - government “does not publish” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/01531, on 28 February 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 8 April 2025, PQ42614, (link).

C) Special adviser pay

Original refusal: Hansard, 29 October 2024, PQ10440, (link); Hansard, 15 October 2024, PQ7440 - non answer (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2024/14571 (this was a multi-part FOI response) on 4 December 2024.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 12 February 2025, PQ28578, (link).

D) Cabinet Office trade union facility time agreement

Original refusal: Hansard, 21 October 2024, PQ8814, - it is “not published” (link).

Disclosed by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2024/14572 (this was a multi-part FOI response) on 31 December 2024.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 13 May 2025, PQ49389, (link).

E) List of responsibilities of No10 special advisers

Original refusal: Hansard, 18 October 2024, PQ8425, - “the Government does not publish” (link).

Disclosed by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2024/14571 (this was a multi-part FOI response) on 11 December 2024.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 9 May 2025, PQ42608, (link).

F) No9 Media Room Refurbishment

Original refusal: Hansard, 22 January 2025, PQ23884, “will be published in due course” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/01530 on 28 February 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 3 April 2025, PQ41653, (link).

G) Domestic flights by the Prime Minister

Original refusals: Hansard, 28 March 2025, PQ39688, (link); Hansard, 6 March 2025, PQ34453, - non answer (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/05760 on 14 May 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 6 June 2025, PQ53886, (link).

H) Cabinet Office Honours Handbook

Original refusal: Hansard, 7 April 2025, PQ43222, - non answer (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/05759 of 16 May 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 2 June 2025, PQ54277, (link).

I) Government Communications Service numbers

Original refusal: Hansard, 5 December 2024, PQ16512, “a risk that individuals could be identified.” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI Internal Review response – IR2025/05101 of 29 May 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 4 September 2025, PQ70468, (link).

J) Communication spending savings

Original refusal: Hansard, 30 January 2025, PQ25685, “currently no plans to publish” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/05753 of 12 June.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 7 July 2025, PQ64559, (link).

K) FCDO/Embassy Government Art Collection

Original refusal: Hansard, 13 May 2025, PQ50572, points to information which does not exist (link).

Released by DCMS under FOI, ref: FOI2025/05106, of 8 July 2025.

L) Cabinet Office staff without jobs

Original refusal: Hansard, 8 May 2025, PQ48950, “the precise staffing level is subject to continuous adjustments.” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/09675 of 11 July 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 28 October 2025, PQ71227, (link).

M) Ministers with criminal convictions

Original refusal: Hansard, 15 January 2025, PQ22458, (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/05758 of 10 July 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 3 December 2025, PQ94209, (link).

N) Special Advisers FDA recognition

Original refusal: Hansard, 10 April 2025, PQ44032, “The government does not publish such information.” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/09624 of 16 July 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 15 October 2025, PQ73720, (link).

O) £34.7 billion cost of Chagos deal

Original refusal: Hansard, 26 June 2025, PQ61200, “it is not normal practice for government departments to release details” (link).

Released by Government Actuary Department, under FOI, internal review, Ref: FOI252626, 4 August 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing HM Treasury to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release: Hansard, 8 January 2026, PQ101383, (link).

-This disclosure is particularly concerning given the Ministry of Defence has told Parliament the £34.7 billion figure is “incorrect”, yet the FOI shows the figure was clearly provided by the Government Actuary Department (Hansard, 26 November 2025, PQ92657, link).

P) Sue Gray severance payment

Original refusal: Lords Hansard, 20 November 2024, PQ HL1816, (link); (this question was blocked from being tabled by the Commons Table Office) - “it is not appropriate to comment on individuals”

Released by the Cabinet Office further to the ICO appeal application, ICO reference IC-390141-T8J5, further to the Cabinet Office FOI reference FOI2025/01532; released on 4 August 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place. Post-FOI release Hansard, 3 September 2025, PQ73313, (link); Hansard, 2 September 2025, PQ69874, (link).

Q) Admiralty House ministerial residences

Original refusal: Hansard, 27 March 2025, PQ52870, “we do not disclose” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office, under FOI, ref: FOI2025/09713 on 12 August 2025.

R) Wind farms environmental principles assessment

Original refusal: Hansard, 1 August 2024, PQ1517, “not published routinely” (link).

This was released by MHCLG under EIR, ref: EIR2024/17924, on 17 September 2024.

A subsequent question asked for this EIR disclosure to be published, but Ministers refused again. This is particularly poor – as Ministers are knowingly refusing to release information to Parliament that has already been released into the public domain. There can be no ‘public interest’ reason for refusing to disclose such material.

This second refusal saw the minister repeating his original answer!

“Kevin Hollinrake: for what reason the requested information was released under the EIR regime; and if he will now publish that substantive disclosure.”

Matthew Pennycook: “Environmental principles assessments are not routinely published”

S) Permanent Secretary model contract

Original refusal: Lords Hansard, 19 May 2025, PQ HL7118, “not published publicly” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/09712, on 9 September 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place: Hansard, 9 December 2025, PQ95641, (link).

T) DESNZ Ministers domestic flights

Original refusal: Hansard, 17 June 2025, PQ58273, points to information which doesn’t exist (link).

Released by DESNZ under FOI, ref: FOI2025/11799, on 10 September 2025.

U) Chinese Embassy call-in lobbying

Original refusal: Hansard, 9 December 2024, PQ16572, “We do not routinely publish” (link).

This was released by MHCLG, under EIR, ref: EIR31081 on 3 March 2025. A further set of documents were released under EIR internal review request IR2025/10529 of 2 April 2025.

Again, a subsequent question was asked for the EIR disclosure to be published, but Ministers refused again to disclose the information – even though it had already been released under a transparency regime! Parliament is being snubbed a second time. Ministers asserted: “The government does not routinely publish responses to information requests.”

V) Cabinet Office Guidance on Social Media Influencers

Original refusal: Hansard, 4 September 2025, PQ70489, “no current plans to publish” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/18068, on 5 December 2025.

W) Cabinet Office London weighting guidance

Original refusal: Hansard, 7 July 2025, PQ63340, “no current plans to publish” (link).

Released by Cabinet Office under FOI, ref: FOI2025/12570 of 28 August 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place: Hansard, 30 October 2025, PQ84249, (link).

X) Admiralty House repairs and furniture

Original refusal: Hansard, 27 May 2025, PQ52869, non answer (link).

Released by Cabinet Office, under FOI, ref: FOI2025/12565 of 21 October 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place: Hansard, 7 November 2025, PQ86671, (link).

Y) MOD spending on EDI

Original refusal: Hansard, 26 September 2024, PQ1555, “disproportionate cost” (link).

Released by MOD, under FOI, ref: FOI2025/21409, disclosed on 12 September 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place: Hansard, 20 November 2025, PQ91657, (link).

Z) DEFRA spending on EDI

Original refusal: Hansard, 8 May 2025, PQ45822, “not held centrally” (link)

Released by DEFRA, under FOI, ref: FOI2025/24724, on 2 December 2025.

A subsequent question was tabled forcing the department to publish the FOI disclosure – to make the point it should have been released in the first place: Hansard, 17 December 2025, PQ96738, (link).

Conclusions

The government really is taking the mick - they have broken not just the ministerial code but rules and promises which they themselves announced.

This is not just treating MPs and Parliament with contempt but voters too. If you believe in democracy and transparency you can see why this will mean worse quality government.

Andy Burnham has made a big deal of the new "Duty of Candour" for public officials which Labour have legislated for (the “Hillsborough Law”). They should start by applying that duty of candour to themselves…

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The monthly data is published here. NHS England has gone from an annualised running cost of £1,152m to £1,306m – so up £153 million a year – pretty strange for an organisation that is supposedly being abolished to save money. That alone is a 13% increase.

There are 11 organisations in the central NHS bureaucracy where we have data over the whole period1.

In total, the central health bureaucracy (including the department of health and agencies) is up by £284m a year – a 12% increase, which is enough to employ 8,000 more basic grade nurses.

I have also tried to understand what is going on below the hood.

Overall FTE staffing in the central bureaucracy is very very slightly up (by 82 or 0.2%), so the growth in the bill is higher pay. One reason for the pay growth may be churn - there are lots more people in the other agencies and I suspect that there will be a lot of moving and “rebadging” around the DHSC - NHSE merger.

In some agencies this is quite striking – the NHS Business Services Authority has 758 (or 17%) more payroll staff than July 2024, and its total paybill is up 38%. it is not clear to me why.

I wanted to check if the growth in paybill is the costs of sacking people and it isn’t. There has been a big increase in – “Payroll staff costs; Allowances” which may contain such costs. But even without that payroll salary costs are up 12% (cell AE63) - so this is making little to no difference to the overall picture, which is basically this: people moving around in the system, overall numbers not shrinking at all, and the costs growing substantially.

So much for a crackdown on central bureaucracy…

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The Defence Investment Plan

The final act in Starmer’s fall was the Defence Investment Plan, with a gaping hole in the plan for funding it. This included:

- £4.7 billion “to be funded at Budget 2026”.

- £4 billion of capital cuts in NHS, education, roads etc (these departments admit they have no idea1 how to find this.)

- £2.4bn allocated to “more efficient procurement” (polite language for “unfunded”).

- £1.1bn allocated to unknown “MOD asset sales” (what are they selling?)

But the supermassive black hole at the heart of the DIP is just the start. We have promised NATO that we will be spending 3.5% GDP by 2035. But Andy Burnham has declined to commit to his new Chancellor John Healey’s demand to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030.

So quite apart from funding the unfunded DIP, there is a big unresolved difference of views about hitting the NATO target. Given the appointment of Ed Miliband has gone down very badly in the US, there is every chance the UK is pressed by NATO allies to move faster on this, and the Chancellor is on the record saying we must. Who will back down?

Early release of prisoners and sex offenders

In September, part of Labour’s Sentencing Act 2026 will come into force, meaning that killers, rapists and sex offenders will qualify for early release. 700 offenders are due to be released in this first wave, with 5,000 expected to be released early in total.

Victims have begun to receive letters from the government telling them their abusers or attackers are set to be freed under the scheme.

Last time this happened, there were numerous examples of offenders re-committing within hours of being let out of prison early.

Burnham has briefed the Times that he is exploring how to tighten the early release scheme to prevent child sex offenders from walking free.

Will he intervene to prevent sexual offenders being released in the first wave in September? Will he prevent violent offenders being released early as well? Time is ticking away….

Northern Ireland veterans and the Troubles Bill

The Government is attempting to repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy Act and replace it with a Troubles Bill.

Al Carns, in his resignation letter, described their bill as “unfit for purpose,” saying it “risks failing the very veterans it claims to protect”, while Paul Young, a spokesman for the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, has called on Burnham to drop the bill.

Does he intend to drop the legislation? Or will he carry forward the legislation and open the door for vexatious claims against our veterans? Even though Al Carns says it is failing our veterans?

Chagos

The Diego Garcia bill, which would have ratified the Chagos surrender, was not reintroduced at the last King’s Speech.

However, it has been reported that Jonathan Powell is set to maintain his role as National Security Adviser, and that Burnham is considering completing the Chagos surrender.

Will he commit to dropping the Chagos surrender? If not, where does he intend to find the £35bn to pay for the use of what is currently sovereign British territory? With the Starmer government forced to drop the crazy plan after the US withdrew support, will Burnham really push on with this?

SEND legislation

Council spending on support for special educational needs has tripled over the last decade, reaching £14.8bn in 2025/26. One in five students now receive SEND support.

The statutory override that has allowed councils’ spiralling SEND deficits to be kept off their balance sheets was extended at the last budget to 2027-28, with the Treasury committing to absorb 90% of historic deficits built up by March 2026.

The government’s white paper on SEND reform proposed an increase in spending out to 2029, followed by a reduction which mysteriously kicks in just after the next election. But Phillipson was always very hazy on what legislation would bring about these future savings. Amazingly, the government has refused to answer multiple FOI requests on what these forecasts are based on:

But as the fiscal forecast rolls forward if the government wants to keep banking those future savings they will have to come forward with the legislation to deliver them.

In an interview with PoliticsHome, Burnham called ECHPs “part of the problem, in that [they add] much greater fragmentation to an already fragmented landscape” and called for a “whole school, not individual child funding model”.

Will Burnham stick with Phillipson’s plan? Now you mention it, what even was Phillipson’s plan?

Will he extend the statutory override again? The OBR has projected that cumulative deficits will reach around £14bn by the time the override expires. How does he expect to pay for this?

Puberty blockers

In February, the “Pathways” clinical trial for puberty blockers was paused over MHRA safety and ethics concerns. A modified protocol has been agreed and is scheduled to commence on 1^st August 2026. Children as young as 11 will still be eligible. We will be in a situation where the government is banning the sale of energy drinks to the under 16s but allowing the use of experimental drugs which may cause irreversible damage to 11 year olds.

Burnham was one of 253 MPs who mysteriously “missed” the vote on a Conservative motion to halt the trial.

Will he allow it to continue?

Benefits bill

The number of claimants on Universal Credit with no requirement to work has increased by 1.5 million since Labour took office, and total spending on health and disability-related benefits is forecast to rise to £100 billion by 2030.

Sir Stephen Timms has said “The current rate of welfare spending is not a concern” but voters disagree. Working age benefit spending in Great Britain was £139.7 bn in 2024/5, and will rise to £178 bn by 2030/31. So the bill per person will be over £2,500 a year, or for a family of four that is over £10,000 a year. For context that is about 9 times what we currently spend on the police in England and Wales (£20bn) or nearly 3 times what we spend on schools in England (£65bn)

Several welfare rebels have already called on Burnham to rule out using welfare cuts to fill the £4.7bn black hole left by Sir Keir’s defence spending plan, and in an interview with LBC, he ruled out what he described as “crude cuts to benefit levels that then just put people who are struggling in even worse poverty, and that often creates the backlash, and understandably so.”

Does he have any plan to address the ballooning of health and disability related benefits?

Will he accept Kemi’s offer of support from Conservative MPs to get future welfare reforms through parliament?

If not, (in the now infamous words of Pat McFadden) who will he tax in order to pay for the benefits of others?

NEETS

Since the election youth unemployment in the UK has surged to levels above the eurozone for the first time in many years. This is a very bad result, but no great surprise: the government has massively tightened employment regulation with the employment bill, massively hiked tax in a way that targets low wage workers, and tried to bring about their pledge to align minimum wage rates for 18 year olds with those for the most experienced workers.

There are now more than one million young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), and this is expected to rise to 1.25 million by the end of the decade. The crisis is costing the country £125 billion a year, which is more than the government spends on education.

Burnham has talked about ending an education system that is “overly focused on the university route,” and has promised a guarantee of a work placement or apprenticeship for every 16- to 18-year-old who wants one.

When might we see proposals for what this might look like? Who will be paying for it?

Student loans

In April, the Government announced that Plan 2 student loans will be capped at 6% in the next academic year.

Since then, it’s been reported that 4.4 million graduates with these loans are now in more debt than they were when they started making repayments.

Does he agree with Conservative proposals to abolish real interest rates for Plan 2 student loans? If not, what is his alternative to stop graduate debt from snowballing?

Pensioners being dragged into income tax

Rachel Reeves confirmed in last year’s budget that the current bands of income tax will remain in place until April 3031. Forecasts suggest 9.3 million pensioners could be dragged into paying income tax by 2030 if no changes are made. The Starmer government promised this would be dealt with but has said nothing further.

The OBR has predicted that the Treasury will raise £100m from the new payers over the next five years.

In an interview with the i paper, Burnham said that this was an issue that the next government needs to look at.

How does he intend to protect pensioners? Will he raise he raise the threshold of income tax?

If so, which other taxes will he raise to make up the difference?

Sudanese and Eritrean refugee scheme

Shabana Mahmood has announced plans for a “named sponsorship” route for refugees. It has been suggested that those offered refuge will be those from countries most in need, such as Sudan and Eritrea. The government hopes that it will reduce the huge numbers arriving on the small boats if the nationalities arriving illegally can just come legally. This is a very expensive and dangerous way to try and massage the figures – and there is a good chance it won’t work anyway.

Similar schemes have brought significant numbers. Homes for Ukraine and the Ukraine Family Scheme have brought over 127,000 Ukrainians to Britain since 2022.

Is Burnham committed to these proposals? What will he set the cap at, and how will he enforce it?

Is he also committed to the Labour manifesto pledge of closing down all asylum hotels? If so, where does he propose to house all of these migrants? Will the government continue to just shift people into expensive suburban accommodation rather than stopping the boats?

ILR

In November, the Home Secretary announced a series of welcome reforms to ILR, which include adopting proposals to extending the qualifying period, and removing the right to benefits for those with ILR. She has said that these changes will take effect this autumn.

More than 100 Labour MPs have already signed a letter to the Home Secretary opposing the changes, including new Communities Secretary Angela Rayner who called the plans “un-British”.

Briefings have suggested that Burnham is considering watering down these plans.

Will these reforms still go ahead this Autumn? Will he take up Kemi’s offer to lend Conservative votes to pass the legislation in full?

Social media changes

Last month, the Government published a Media Green Paper consulting on proposals which would force social media firms to give greater ‘prominence’ to certain state-sanctioned ‘trusted’ news outlets of the government’s choosing.

Burnham’s close ally, Lucy Powell, has gone further, saying she wants the Representation of the People Bill amended to extend broadcaster-style “purdah” rules to social media during election periods. The Bill is due its final Commons stages on the 14^th of July.

Does he agree with this illiberal social media crackdown?

HS2

In an interview with the i paper, Burnham confirmed he wants to bring back the northern leg of HS2. The Manchester leg was due to cost £36bn at the time it was cancelled.

Is he serious about reviving the northern leg of HS2? If so, how will it be funded? Does he intend to cancel other regional transport in order to pay for it?

Council bankruptcy

Debt among local authorities in Britain hit a record £154.6bn at the end of the last financial year, with 25 councils reaching arrears of at least £1 billion.

Eight different councils have issued section 114 notices since 2018.

How does he intend to defuse this ticking time bomb in the public finances?

Oil and gas

Labour introduced a temporary ban on new drilling licences in the North Sea last year and has since pledged to make the move permanent with the ironically names “Energy Independence Bill”

In May, the Government endorsed a legal opinion from the ICJ that would make states responsible for “damage” caused to the world’s climate from their carbon emissions. The former Lord Chief Justice has wanted that all North Sea drilling could be ruled an illegal act as a result.

So far the government are briefing that they plan to keep to this plan. But Labour has has been divided over the issue, with some trade unions and MPs urging Burnham to demonstrate his support for the future of the oil and gas industry. Under Labour, we buy half the gas we use from Norway. Last year, Norway’s Labour Government drilled 49 wells in the North Sea. Ours drilled zero. We are also importing fuel from Russia, while refusing to use our own north sea. With billions of tax revenues also available, will Burham really stick to this national-interest-sacrificing position?

Rape gang inquiry

In December, after first fighting an inquiry then trying to sabotage it, the Government was finally shamed into launching an Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs, after Baroness Casey’s report uncovered a litany of institutional cover-ups, gaps in data collection and repeated failures to act on previous recommendations.

Will Burnham commit to implement the recommendations of the independent inquiry in full? Will he ensure it looks at all examples, rather than just cherry picking a few places?

The fiscal black hole and tax increases

The black hole in the DIP is on top of the £9 billion of completely unspecified “efficiencies” Reeves had already scheduled in the last two years of the forecast in a desperate attempt to make her numbers “add up”. Compared to the last Conservative Budget, spending in 2028/29 alone will be £152 billion higher (that’s 11% more than planned in that year under the Conservatives).

Burnham has suggested he wants to spend more on many things – and he will have to fill in holes left by Starmer and Reeves. He has said he won’t raise the main taxes – so which taxes will he raise? And will the OBR actually score further measures to soak the middle classes? Recent cuts to CGT were actually scored as a saving because the rate was already too high, and the proportion of people paying inheritance tax is already scheduled to increase to record levels. Is there really scope to squeeze even harder?

And finally…

As Prime Minister, Burnham will also inherit a series of longer-term commitments Labour promised in their manifesto. These include: “6,500 more teachers” (when there are 2,322 fewer teachers) and “1.5 million new homes” (when starts are falling and no-one thinks the target will be hit).

And there is also a whole host of other bills promised in Starmer’s outgoing King’s Speech but not yet introduced to Parliament:

• Commercial Payments Bill

• Clean Water Bill

• Competition Reform Bill

• Regulating for Growth Bill

• Highways (Financing) Bill

• Overnight Visitor Levy Bill

• Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill

• Education for All Bill

• Remediation Bill

• Draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill

• Police Reform Bill

• Digital Access to Services Bill

• Removal of Peerages Bill

• Draft Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Bill

• Sovereign Grant Bill

• Energy Independence Bill

• Nuclear Regulation Bill

• National Security Bill

• European Partnership Bill

Does he intend to introduce any of these? Or will he let them fall by the wayside and focus on his own agenda instead?

Conclusions

It has been remarkable to see how quickly the tensions within the Labour Party have risen. On day one in the job former Chief Secretary Darren Jones made it clear that the PM was lying when he claimed he could find funding from cancelling the (unfunded) ID cards programme - and there have been plenty of ministers briefing against one another. And that’s before they face any of these difficult decisions. Good luck everyone!

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The trains are squalid. The toilets don’t work, the doors don’t work, the windows are blown. Too often several carriages have air-conditioning that doesn’t work. You end up standing like cattle on a shortened train.

And the service is dire. In the last two weeks only half of trains have arrived on time. A quarter were late, and fully a quarter were either cancelled or very late (over half an hour):

Delays caused by problems with the trains are at record levels:

And yet, it was all supposed to be so good. New shiny trains were going to arrive in 2022 and our service was supposed to get better. What went wrong?

Several things.

First, the new trains didn’t turn up on time - delays in production from Hitachi meant the new trains were hugely delayed. The order placed in 2019 has seen trains only finally arriving in 2026. That is mainly on Hitachi. I would love to believe that DFT have made someone pay a huge penalty for this, but I am not holding my breath.

The result is that there are still just a handful of new trains running so far, with most of the services still provided by the old ones.

Second, despite the fact that the new trains hadn’t turned up, and it had been known for several years that they would not turn up, despite this, DFT still allowed some of the existing trains to be sent away to other places anyway.

That’s when things got really bad.

At the end of 2025 and early 2026 five trains went off to Lumo in Scotland to run a new service.

This disastrous decision means there is zero slack in the service. It means the remaining trains they do have are in constant use. That in turn has made it nigh-on impossible to maintain these old trains, which are being hammered.

That’s why the toilets don’t work, the doors don’t work, the windows are blown and the air-conditioning doesn’t work, with passengers now melting in the summer heat.

Reliability has gone to pot with lots more cancellations, and trains that are half the length they should be - so people end up standing.

Third, there seem to be mysterious delays in getting the new trains into service, which no-one seems willing to talk about. Both prior to and after the recent tragic crash in which a driver was killed, several insiders have been in touch to talk about various problems. Some of these may stem from DFT fiddling with the design: compared to similar trains elsewhere they have made them shorter to fit in the too-short platforms at St Pancras (aaargh).

Making the trains shorter has caused them to have to completely re-engineer the whole thing. Related to all this, there seem to be complexities about coupling up the new trains which may be limiting the rollout of the new trains (lots of services are supposed to be two five-car units coupled together).

The RMT are now balloting on strike action relating to these issues with the new trains, but no-one involved seems to want to talk in public.

The upshot of all this is that people are paying a fortune for a terrible service: a season ticket from Market Harborough costs over £10,000 a year - and we are only an hour north of London. It’s £12,000 from Nottingham, or a whopping £17,000 from Sheffield.

Knee-jerk answers won’t do here. We can’t just “spend more” - the problems are actually being caused by a large (but botched) investment.

Likewise, nationalisation fans will probably say taking the franchises into public ownership will solve all this. I am less convinced. Labour are not taking the companies that own the rolling stock into public ownership, and the screw up here (allowing our trains to go elsewhere with no replacement) was a decision by the very same unaccountable DFT officials who will be running more of the railway system in future.

I also generally find the operator (EMR) much more responsive than the massive National Rail bureaucracy. Example: if you come to Market Harborough railway station one side of the path is run by EMR and is covered in flower boxes (provided by Market Harborough in Bloom), but the side owned by Network Rail is all derelict, because, despite years of asking, they haven’t allowed the same access for the volunteers on their side. Its a little visible example of how large nationalised entities are not always very responsive.

Conclusions

I would love to believe that lessons will be learned, but nothing I have heard back on this from DFT so far makes me think that they are learning anything.

There is a threat that things will get worse - for starters we may get strike action. And the remaining trains are due to leave during the course of the year: I now have no confidence in DFT not to stop that from happening.

I really feel for the EMR staff on trains and stations, having to deal with angry passengers and day after day of chaos which they did not cause.

But above all I feel sorry for my constituents who use the railway - at the moment we are being kept in the dark with no plan. EMR, Hitachi and ministers at the DFT are all staying tight lipped as we sweat it out on a failing service.

When are our new trains actually turning up in service in greater numbers? When will things get better? If we are going to be waiting a while, couldn’t DFT find us some more trains from somewhere?

This is no way to run a railway.

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Labour do have one big, consistent idea: raise tax and spend more. Burnham will do that for sure.

But beyond that it is very, very thin. Maybe there is a brilliant secret plan under preparation, but so far, the ideas he has set out fall into three categories:

• incredibly familiar / already happening

• hazy or meaningless

• far too small to solve big problems - often problems the government is creating.

Let’s have a quick tour. Below, Burnham’s words are in bold italics, and my thoughts on them are in plain text.

* * * * * * *

“On reindustrialisation, we will support every region to set clear and credible industrial ambitions and provide the support to achieve them, encouraging more cross-UK partnership between places with complementary industrial clusters”

Ah, good old clusters. Lots of Prime Ministers have said very similar things. In fact, Starmer was saying similar things about “firing up our industrial heartlands” not long ago. But the truth is that we are rapidly de-industrialising, because of government energy policy.

The manufacturers trade body Make UK say: “Britain faces deindustrialisation unless manufacturers get relief from high energy prices.” In fact, it’s already happening: Ineos Grangemouth ethanol plant, Sabic's plant in Wilton, Teesside, CF Fertilisers in Ince, and numerous ceramics firms have all closed - blaming Britain’s uniquely high energy prices. As Sir Jim Ratcliffe pointed out after the Grangemouth closure. “De-industrialising Britain achieves nothing for the environment. It merely shifts production and emissions elsewhere” If Burnham was at all serious about this then his first move would be to sack net zero zealot Ed Miliband - instead he is apparently thinking of making him Chancellor.

I am probably about as sympathetic as they come to the ideas that a) we should re-industrialise and b) work hard to get poorer places growing faster. And net zero is just one of the obstacles. But everything Burnham has said so far makes me think this is heading towards yet more high-flown rhetoric, more fiddly, bureaucratic schemes and more eventual disappointment.

* * * * *

“We will make sure that all eligible public contracts are subject to proper social value weighting. And we will do that to make sure British based companies are in a better position to win those contracts…”

Public contracts already have social value weighting - there is literally primary legislation (The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012) promoting it - and lots more besides. In fact there is so much emphasis on “social value” that this can become a problem - for example, British businesses got locked out of bidding for a MOD satellite contract precisely because they could not comply with “social value” red tape on things like Climate Change and Modern Slavery. In reality it would be better to hack back some of the proliferation of woke side-objectives that add cost to procurement and lock out smaller businesses from bidding.

* * * * *

“The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end”

Another very familiar trope - again, Starmer said very similar things not long ago and announced a load of fiddly and inconsequential changes. For example, the government press release breathlessly promised: “a joined-up post-18 education system, with a unified regulator and funding model for level 4+ courses… FE colleges will gain new awarding powers, and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement will ensure parity in student finance across higher level study FE and HE – opening up opportunities for more learners, including through modular courses tailored to priority skills.”

Fine, but meanwhile back in reality, the government has actually been hacking back apprenticeships in various ways (defunding higher apprenticeships and management apprenticeships), while continuing the endless expansion of low value university courses and student debt.

In fact an increasing number of universities require no qualifications to apply - but so far Labour have been opposing Conservative plans to bring in number controls on poor university courses. I will take Burnham’s rhetoric on ‘ending the university obsession’ more seriously when he drops Labour’s opposition to exactly that.

* * * * *

“On utilities, we will ensure all parts of the UK are able to take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport. Learning from the model that has transformed our bus networks here in Greater Manchester. We will set out ten year plans to bring down the cost of these essentials to individuals, families and businesses”

What is “public control”? Public ownership would be astronomically expensive - billions to buy up these utilities. If it is just control then all these utilities are already regulated. If you want to force down energy bills via regulation then fine, but taxpayers will need to fund that - and the experience of 2022 shows how very expensive that can be. So what exactly is going to change here? I detect no sign of a clear plan here.

* * * * *

“Number 10 North will oversee the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period.”

This sounds like a huge spending commitment. Maybe it will be. If so, it’s not obvious that this would be the right priority: The Hills Report (2007), published under the last Labour government, found that even after controlling for a lot of different factors, people in social housing were less likely to be in work than equivalently disadvantaged people in the private rented sector. We already have one of the highest proportions of social housing of any European country. Would this be a better use of taxpayers’ money than some of his other priorities?

But I think this is actually just going to turn out to be a rhetorical sleight of hand, moving money between two definitions - from funding housing associations to funding councils to build. Over the last decade only about 14% of what people call “council housing” has been built by actual councils - the rest is housing associations. That’s because the Housing Associations are able to build at a much lower unit cost, so in the allocation of funding by councils and central government they tend to win out.

Burnham could rig the competition so that more of the money is reserved for councils. Then he would be able to say (misleadingly) that we had “record council house building”. But in reality, he would end up with fewer affordable homes overall, because the cost per house would be higher.

Burnham has also been interested in a different definitional switcheroo - from “affordable rent” (20% cheaper than market rates) to “social rent” (40-50% cheaper). He could then boast of “more social housing”. But again, the real-world downside would be far fewer homes (just six “social” versus ten “affordable” for the same money) and the only upside would be to deepen discounts which are often enormous already: for a 3 bed social property in Westminster or Kensington the subsidy is worth £33,000-34,000 a year.

So with this one it is too early to say. It’s either very expensive - or involves some bad policy choices to stand up misleading political rhetoric.

* * * * *

“we will reform business rates to support pubs and high street businesses.”

Burnham is already a walking away from a clear promise made during his by-election campaign. On 5 June he promised: “We would ensure that all pubs in a constituency like this would have a 20 per cent cut in their business rates, typically worth about £5,000 a year.” That 20% cut seems to have disappeared already, replaced by vague talk about “reform”. In reality Labour has hammered these high street businesses with higher business rates, higher National Insurance and more regulation.

They cut Retail, Hospitality and Leisure business rate relief from 75% to 40%, then to zero. Then, after a furious reaction, they introduced a sticking plaster concession, but that only applies to pubs. Things like shops, cafes, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, theatres, cinemas and clubs don’t get it - only 5% of hospitality businesses even get the sticking plaster.

Overall, OBR have estimated that revenue from business rates will rise by 10 per cent in 2026-27. And these businesses are hit by all the other Labour tax hikes too - overall, in 2028 taxes will be £105 billion higher under Labour plans than previous Conservative plans (up 8%). So this is yet more rhetoric, papering over broken promises.

* * * * *

“we will never get the growth up to the level Britain needs unless every single postcode in the land is set up to contribute to it. This country hasn’t thought in that way before, but with the Makerfield test at the heart of decision making, it will do from now on.”

What exactly is this Makerfield “test”? Is it just a statement that you want poorer places to grow faster? Well, so did loads of other Prime Ministers.

My worry is not just that that Burnham is trying to respond to huge challenges with fiddly micro announcements - but that macro policies will continue to push in the other direction.

An example: Labour’s biggest fiscal move to date has been the £24 billion increase in National Insurance, the great majority of which feeds through into lower wages. Because they cut the threshold rather than, say, raising the rate, Labour’s increase was laser-targeted on low income working people. They cut the threshold from £9,100 a year to £5,000 a year.

The OBR say 76% of the change is passed through into lower wages. So someone on £13,000 loses £500. Someone on £9,000 loses 5% of their income. This is a regressive policy because poorer people are taking much bigger losses as a share of their income (the green line below).

And if you hit poor people, you hit poorer places too. People in Makerfield will be losing more of their income than people in London from this policy.

So this massive, tens-of-billions policy obviously fails the “Makerfield test” - but will Burnham get rid of it? At one point he was critical of it. On 5 June he said: “I have said that I thought the weight of the burden on employers’ National Insurance wasn’t the right decision.”

But now he seems to have fallen silent. Even Rachel Reeves now admits there is a “valid argument” this tax increase was a mistake. No kidding. But there is no plan to fix it, because they want to do lots more spending.

Conclusion

I could go on and on. My worry for Burnham is that despite the soaring rhetoric, nothing he is saying makes me think he has ideas on the scale needed to deliver real change.

For example, I am more interested than many in how we can make poorer places grow faster. But to change trends that have often been going on or over a century you need a bazooka - not a peashooter. For example, you need to think about how we can move some of the vast sums we spend on welfare in poor places from paying the bills of social failure to investing in the future.

Likewise, if you want to make housing affordable again you need to change a lot of things - not just fiddle with different definitions or build a few more council houses. And if you want to “reindustrialise” or “save the high street”, you need to tear up, not repeat, the policies of the Starmer government.

I hope I am wrong. But as things stand, I worry we are just going from one middle aged guy in a dark shirt to another, and the country will carry on declining.

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Andy Burnham has declared that there is “room for movement on tax”. Will Burnham really put up taxes yet again this autumn? You might think that having broken their promises and increased national insurance, increased income tax, and raised tax to record levels, that Labour might be done. Nope.

Why?

• The bottom line is that Labour have spent a lot more. Compared to the last Conservative Budget, spending in 2028/29 alone will be £152 billion higher (that’s 11% more than planned in that year under the Conservatives). Taxes will be £105 billion higher (up 8%) and borrowing will be £47 billion higher (more than double previous plans). The increase in spending wasn’t one big jump: spending keeps ratcheting upward:

• You can only borrow so much. Burnham has made some very unwise comments about not “being in hock to the bond markets” which have spooked markets, but in reality, any attempt to just borrow and borrow endlessly will blow up. And Burnham won’t cut spending, so more tax it is.

• Those figures above don’t recognise the full mess either. Keir Starmer has left him at least £5 billion to find for the defence plan, on top of the £9 billion of completely unspecified “efficiencies” Reeves had already scheduled in the last two years of the forecast in a desperate attempt to make her numbers “add up”.1

• Labour had already built up various pressures for more spending – for example, they said they would deal with the fact that poor pensioners are being dragged into paying income tax by the frozen tax threshold, but so far haven’t come up with a solution.

• In addition, Burnham also has a long list of commitments which he has floated at one time or another. In his speech on 29th June he promised “the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period” and “greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport.” He has also been wobbly on Indefinite Leave to Remain - but concessions to the Labour backbenches would jack up the welfare bill. During the Makerfield by-election he promised a business rate cut, saying that “all pubs in a constituency like this would have a 20 per cent cut in their business rates.”

And all that’s before you deal with any fiscal impact from the Iran crisis.

Gulp.

Normally, Prime Ministers try to get their disappointments in early, and Burnham may well try to grab the extra tax while he is still in his honeymoon.

No wonder the tax speculation is already well underway. There are several leading contenders. There are still months to go but here are the runners and riders so far.

Possible tax increases

Burnham says he won’t raise Income Tax, or VAT, or hike National Insurance further. But there is room for movement elsewhere.

It’s interesting to look at who is advising Burnham. Miatta Fahnbulleh is said to be “running policy” along with Josh Simons, who made way for him in Makerfield.

Miatta has previously called for a breathtakingly large number of different tax increases, so that doesn’t help us narrow down much.

Simons was part of the Labour growth group - their work has been less crude but argues for a shift of the tax burden onto capital and property and that seems more likely.

Here are the taxes that have already become the focus of particular speculation:

1. Increasing Capital Gains Tax

This has been floated in numerous places. Reeves’ first Budget already sharply raised CGT, with the lower rate increased from 10% to 18%, and the higher rate from 20% to 24%. This is one of the changes that has sent investors running for the exit. But many in Labour they want to hike it further.

• The Labour Growth Group argue we should raise an extra £14 billion from CGT.

• In May former health secretary Wes Streeting set out plans for a co called “wealth tax” that would equalise CGT with income tax.

• More ominously on Sunday key Burnham aide Louise Haigh said that CGT rates “should be brought closer to income tax rates” (the UK’s top rate is 45%).

The macro problem with that is, as I argued before, that Labour are already building their plans on getting tens of billions more from large investor types, while simultaneously doing everything they can to drive them away.

And one additional specific problem with this is that the Treasury and OBR may be reluctant to score any meaningful extra money once dynamic effects are considered. When the Conservative government cut CGT on property from 28% to 24% in Spring 2024, the OBR scored it as raising revenue not costing it, because it would lead to more transactions.

2. Hikes in Inheritance tax

Burnham has nodded in the direction of inheritance tax already. He said: “It is urgent, the need to fix social care, and I personally would look at all of the kinds of implications of that in relation to inheritance tax and care changes and everything. I wouldn’t flinch from it”. (The Guardian, 4 June 2026, link).

A problem with this is that Labour are already on course to have huge numbers paying. Rachel Reeves has frozen the nil rate threshold out to 20312 and brought in more things like pensions. Soon, nearly one in ten people who die will be subject to it - that’s twice the average over the last couple of decades.

Is this tenable? Previously when the number of people paying has grown it has become very unpopular and governments have been forced to take action. In 2007 Labour introduced the transferable nil-rate band, effectively doubling the tax-free threshold to £600,000. Once numbers paying started to rise again in summer 2015 George Osborne introduced the Residence Nil Rate Band. Is it really plausible to have even more people paying than already planned?

3. CGT on top of IHT

Rachel Reeves applied inheritance tax not just to family farms and family businesses but unused defined contribution pension pots. Burnham could go one further and end the practice of rebasing CGT liabilities on death.

The Labour Growth Group, which Josh Simons is part of, have argued that: “The uplift at death that lets substantial gains escape tax altogether should be removed.”

The IFS think this exemption is worth about £1.5 billion a year. If Burnham wants a “wealth tax” this might be attractive. It has academic sympathisers too - thought probably only if done as a wider reform rather than revenue grab. For example, the IFS argue that “Uplift (or ‘forgiveness’) of CGT at death should be ended. It creates a very big incentive for people to hold on to assets well past the point at which it is efficient for them to do so.”

On the other hand, the argument against this is obvious: you would have double taxation, paying not just inheritance tax on death but CGT too, with the same assets taxed twice over and the share of people’s family assets taxed away rising to crazy, punitive rates - potentially 64% of the value above the threshold. You could get that figure down though. The original CenTax report which the Labour Growth Group are pointing to suggests “giving the inheritor a deduction against CGT (on a subsequent disposal) in respect of the IHT already paid on the asset.” So Burnham could set the combined rate at whatever level he chose - very high but perhaps not 64%. To be honest, the sheer complexity of this might be attractive to Burnham: a policy that is hard to explain is harder to attack.

4. Land/ property value tax

Burnham criticised the current council tax system and called for a land tax. In his leadership launch speech he said: “It’s a highly regressive tax, and I think it’s not justifiable based on those 1991 valuations. I see a big case for land and property and business taxation to be changed”

Specifically, he signed up to support the ‘Fairer Share, The Proportional Property Tax’ campaign. The proposed tax is a ‘flat rate of 0.48 per cent on the current value of your property’. In the version the “Fairer Share” campaign advocates, the government would use this money to scrap Council Tax and Stamp Duty, and the whole thing would even out. But Burnham needs tax revenues, and it is particularly hard to see him copying Kemi Badenoch’s commitment to abolish Stamp Duty. So he might focus on just the property tax element: the takeaway part without the give-back part.

A 0.48 per cent annual property tax would raise about £44 billion3. Council taxes across the UK raise about £50 billion. So Burnham could do the property tax bit, cut council tax a lot (perhaps abolish it for lower bands) and still raise some money overall.

The argument against this is that you would have a massive and very visible new tax on people, potentially on top of Council Tax. The proposal is basically the old domestic “Rates”. Though no-one now remembers it now (because of the Poll Tax disaster) the old “Rates” were very unpopular. In particular they hit older people who wanted to stay put in areas that had become more expensive over time4. Even a shift from council tax to rates would create huge redistribution, with some really massive losers in areas with expensive property. This would be a sort of “core vote” strategy, except that it would also wallop the seats Labour hold in London.

5. Bank tax.

An early spat has erupted between different Burnham backers over the prospect of further taxes on financial services. Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the TUC, has said that Burnham could raise £9 billion over four years by re-introducing a bank surcharge. But Lord (Jim) O’Neill said: “We can’t just keep avoiding what are seen as difficult choices and having backdoor ways of raising taxes. And we certainly shouldn’t raise them on business”.

With this one the downside is obvious: the UK financial service industry is already struggling under the weight of tax and regulation. Look at the lack of new IPOs, with fundraising falling to its lowest level in 30 years, and just five companies listing in the first half of 2025. So doing something that puts us at a further disadvantage compared to competitors would potentially be bad for jobs and so bad for tax revenues.

Nonetheless, the speculation is already hitting confidence. The FT quoted a senior Banker saying, “The City is holding its breath. It feels very likely they will raise taxes on banks — just look at the direction of travel on spending.”

Conclusions

I have already met a couple of people who are changing their plans because of this tax speculation. Either trying to dispose of assets before a CGT hike, or thinking about where to locate business.

Burnham needs to realise that tax speculation is itself damaging - as Reeves’ experience last year showed. The UK economy is really limping along already, and youth unemployment has gone from being lower than the eurozone to higher under Labour.

I obviously think that we need to cut spending and cut tax and get the economy moving.

But if Burnham is going to raise our taxes even more (please don’t) then he should make up his mind fast and end the damaging speculation. But what are the chances of that? Anyone’s guess…

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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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