But the stats agree - it’s bad out there for young people - really bad. Let’s take a look.

At the start of the century about two thirds of all young men aged 16-24 were in work. It is now just half1.

Some of this reflects rising numbers in higher education. But even when we just look at those who are not in full time education, the share of young people who are either unemployed or inactive is close to historic levels (the green line below). In fact it is higher than in the early 1990s, (the Full Monty era, if you will), which at the time was widely considered to be disastrous.

This is driven by steadily and dramatically rising levels of inactivity – people who are not even seeking work, often because they are on benefits (shown in the red line below).

The long term deterioration is particularly pronounced for young men (orange below). From 1997-2004 only about 20% of young men who weren’t in education were not in work. Now it is 31%.

For me the really alarming thing is that we are seeing this outside a recession. We can see there were high rates of unemployment after the recession of the early 90s, and again after the 2009 recession (the blue line above). We aren’t in a recession right now but steadily and relentlessly the share of young people who are not in education but inactive has been going up and up. So my question is – what happens the next time there is a downturn?

And of course it is worse in some places. I asked the Commons Library to do some analysis of the underlying data. 40% of young people in London who are not in education are inactive or unemployed.

Across the UK there are 1,038,000 18-24 year olds who are not in education and not in or work, and 1,239,000 16-24 year olds - think about what we could do if we could move some of those people into work.

Worse than it looks?

But there are several things that mean the situation may be even worse than it appears in the data above, which is from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). The LFS is a classic workhorse survey the ONS produces to estimate employment and unemployment, but over recent years it has had some well-known problems which are still being ironed out. There is a lot of debate about this, but good reasons to think we should look at some other data sources2.

Lets look at benefits data. Disability benefits for young people have grown faster than the LFS survey’s count of young people inactive through sickness.

Between Labour taking office and July 2026 the number of 16-24 year olds claiming PIP increased by 79,000, or 21%

This is a continuation of a trend - since 2019 the growth of PIP claims has been particularly dramatic among young people:

The DWP’s own forecast is that benefits for young people will continue to grow faster than for adults. Between the Conservatives leaving office in 2023/4 and 2030/31) DWP forecast that:

• Spending on incapacity benefits for working age people (mainly UC Health) will have increased from £25.3bn to £36.2bn (43%)

• Spending on working age disability benefits (DLA and PIP) will have increased from £19.1bn to £37.2bn (95%)

• Spending on DLA for children will have increased from £3.6bn to £8.3bn (128%)

What about nationality?

Another data source we can look at is HMRC Real Time Information (RTI)3. It contains information on what nationality adults held when they first got a national insurance number.

We can see from the RTI data that the number of jobs held by young British people has actually gone down in the last year - there were 61,000 fewer jobs held by young people from the UK in December 2025 compared to December 2024. This has been partially disguised by an increase among young people from outside the EU.

International comparisons

For the first time, youth unemployment in the UK is worse than the EU average4

Labour inherited a rate of youth unemployment below the eurozone, but it is now above. In July 2024 it was 13.8% in the UK and 15% in the euro area. As of June 2026 it was 16.4% in the UK and 15.2% in the eurozone5.

Youth unemployment among 20-24 year olds in London is higher than in Estonia, Croatia and Slovakia. Youth unemployment among 20-24 year olds where I am based in the East Midlands is worse than Lithuania, Slovenia and Bulgaria6

Conclusions

It is pretty bad out there for young people. While some of these problems have been building up for too long, Britain’s relative performance got a lot worse after Rachel Reeves became chancellor.

There is no mystery about why this is. The new Labour government decided to simultaneously:

• Hugely increase the jobs tax, in a way focussed on lower earners - which therefore disproportionately hit young people…

• …While also increasing business rates for the high street sectors most likely to employ young people.

• Massively increase labour market regulation with the Employment Bill, which made it much less attractive to hire young people

• Attempt to equalise the minimum wage for 18 year olds and 60 year olds for the first time - something rejected by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (and which some people in government are now frantically trying to back away from)

You can see the impact of some of this in the way that smaller businesses have cut hiring more than others - for them the regulatory changes bite hardest because they don’t have the scale or HR departments to cope.

High rates of youth unemployment have bad longer term consequences for people’s later earnings and employment - something described as “scarring” by economists. So we need to get worklessness down urgently. The government’s Milburn Review has been pushed back but some pretty drastic moves are needed urgently.

On the Conservative side we have set out plans to:

• Halve the jobs tax for people aged 21-24 (which builds on our previous decision in 2015 to abolish it for the under 21s.)

• Set up “Get to work” - which will mean that young people who have not worked will no longer be able to drift straight from school into claiming benefits.

• Create 100,000 more apprenticeships a year for 18-21 year olds, funded by cutting numbers on low-value university courses which are expensive for taxpayers and don’t help students.

• Replace the current sickness and disability benefits - ending PIP claims for lower-level mental health conditions and returning PIP claims for back and joint pain to their 2021 level.

• Cut business rates on high street shops, giving business rates relief to 250,000 high street businesses, which have traditionally given young people their first shot at work.

One way or another, something big needs to be done - it’s really bad out there for young people.

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This is relevant for Britain, because we have a Prime Minister committed to bringing the country closer into Europe’s legal orbit. Whether that is a good or a bad idea is therefore a deeply practical question – what would the law do, what would the UK get, and what would we give up in return?

Sadly, a close look at the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), which Burnham wants us to be aligned with, shows it is EU policymaking at its very worst. Lots of noble, lofty words about achieving European AI sovereignty. But little recognition of the fundamental reality that Europe is not, and has no prospect anytime soon of being, at the frontier. And then some very bad ideas of the kind that are compounding our economic problems in Europe.

What is in CADA?

There’s a lot in CADA that I could get into – Net Zero for data centres, prioritising the kind of open source technology that primarily comes from China. But though these are important, I think the most important is that CADA would place strict limitations on the kinds of AI that governments can actually use.

In true eurocrat style, this involves the creation of a new layer of bureaucracy, with each member state charged with creating its own “national competent authority” that can accredit AI products for use (Article 17). But the real problem is what it takes to be accredited in the first place.

All AI products used by EU governments would have to meet “assurance level 1” (Article 30), which requires, among other things, that:

- The company itself is “established in the Union”,

- “Where the [AI company] is subject to the control of a third country… there are no laws and practices in that third country… that require the [AI firm] to report information on software vulnerabilities to authorities… prior to those vulnerabilities being known to have been exploited”. (Clause 1, Annex II)

The conditions get progressively stricter as the use cases get more sensitive, such as /security, defence or justice. For instance, Level 2 requires:

- The firm’s infrastructure, assets and personnel are all inside the EU

- “if the [AI company]… is subject to the control of a third country… they demonstrate… that the possibility of disruption of the service… by a third country… is prevented”. (Clause 2, Annex II)

Assurance levels 3 and 4 exclude ownership or influence by third countries altogether.

What might this mean in the real world?

This all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But let’s think about what this means in the world as it is. All the best frontier models are currently developed and operated by American companies, staffed by largely American employees and built on American infrastructure. In Euro-speak, the US is very much a “third country”.

In the first instance, a plain reading of the criteria for levels 3 and 4 would simply exclude American firms – i.e. the world’s best AI companies - from working on the most important government problems altogether.

But even levels 1 and 2 are problematic. Demanding that “there are no laws and practices… that require the [AI firm] to report information on software vulnerabilities to authorities” seemingly runs against the regulation that the AI industry is itself asking for.

We have to be clear-eyed: the most important AI regulation is likely to be via domestic US law, governing these firms’ activities in the US. And the frontier labs themselves are pushing for mandatory reporting, which will probably be to the US government:

- OpenAI has called for “a mandatory evaluation process” run by the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation as the “US federal government’s primary institution for frontier AI safety”.

- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that “frontier labs should partner with government to formalize the idea of permanent embedded evaluators”

- Demis Hassabis has proposed a “new Standards Body”, which would be “federally overseen” with a view that frontier models would be “required to pass [testing] to be deployed”.

Any company subject to regulation in this way would seemingly be ineligible for even the lowest assurance level in CADA.

The one thing Britain has done to play itself into these important debates was Rishi Sunak’s decision to create AISI, which is the only serious non-US player in these debates. UK government’s have fought to keep AISI access to frontier models. It would be quite easy for measures which might strengthen AISI oversight to fall foul of this new EU law.

Excluding the possibility of disruption is also impossible for US firms. Earlier this year, Anthropic’s latest models were temporarily withdrawn after the US threatened to impose export controls. There is no way for any US company to guarantee that this will not happen again.

This is a bad idea

My view is that CADA is likely to be extremely bad for European public services, because European governments will effectively be cutting off their access to the world’s best AI services. The combination of the law and political pressure will push us away from using the best, but will not create an EU sovereign capability any more than when Europe tried to create an “EU Google”, known as “Quaero”. Reader, it did not go well.

Their own impact assessment recognises that its plan will come at a price, noting “any additional costs linked to providing sovereign services – compliance costs linked to audits, certification costs, the use of EU-based infrastructure, higher labour costs for EU-based staff – would be passed on to customers at higher prices”.^[1]

But that assumes that Europe gets the same AI technology, albeit at a higher price. Recent history suggests that it simply will not happen.

The question for Britain is what we need to agree to in order to be accredited as an ‘associated’ third country under CADA (Article 18), which would allow UK tech to be accredited up to assurance level 3. Would it involve our own government signing up to the same standards, so that Europe’s anti-competitive wall now extends around us?

These are the practical problems that need to be addressed about what greater alignment actually means. Imagine a future Labour government tries to bring us back into the EU. If the government is already using US-based AI services, would re-entering mean adopting CADA and ending those deals? What would that mean for public services? Would that actually be in the best interest of the British public?

Sadly, I don’t think this Labour government has answers.

^[1] Unbelievably, there is also a lengthy section espousing the benefits of protectionism, stating that there will be “domestic value added through import substitution”, arguing that it would “stimulate additional investment in cloud and AI infrastructure within the EU”. That’s right – the EU’s view is that banning what are quite literally the most technologically advanced and high value-add tools in the history of the human species will actually be good for the European economy.

Incidentally, this is basically the Chinese government’s approach to industrial policy: ban imports and then force your taxpayers to subsidise uncompetitive domestic firms until they have caught up with the rest of the world. The problem with the comparison is that the Chinese have far tougher bans on foreign products than the EU is proposing, and critically that the volume of subsidy is absolutely enormous in China, to the point of drastically suppressing household incomes. I somehow doubt the EU would be willing to do that if that’s takes to catch up with the frontier (which China can’t currently do anyway).

From a human point of view, it is a terrible tax. That is probably why so many countries don’t have an inheritance tax, or have abolished it. Australia, New Zealand and Canada have abolished it. Norway and Sweden have abolished theirs. 18 OECD countries don’t have one - and even where they do exist they are way more reasonable. For example, in Italy children pay 4 per cent, compared to 40 per cent in the UK.

People particularly resent the double taxation here - you already paid income tax, and then they take 40% of what you saved from your post-tax income.

A broken tax

But even if you are some desiccated leftie wonk who cares nothing for pathetic human emotions and thinks about our society purely as a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet, Inheritance Tax (IHT) is still a bad dysfunctional tax.

It’s badly named for starters - it is actually an estates tax, not a tax on inheritances, so takes no account of how much the recipients have or how much the wealth is spread. I don’t think any economists think this is sensible.

It’s also trivially easy for truly wealthy people to avoid. You simply set up a trust, and trusts, being immortal, do not die and do not pay tax either. You might ask, why can’t we abolish all trusts (and maybe companies)? Or why can’t we tax them somehow? That’s a long story, but suffice for now to say that solving this problem has proved impossible even for very bright and highly motivated people, from Ed Balls and Gordon Brown to Nigel Lawson, this problem has not proved fixable. You can also avoid it simply by gifting assets - as long as you don’t then die within seven years.

This is why it has often been criticised even from the left.

Even Labour’s favourite think tank, the Resolution Foundation - when it was run by brainy Labour Minister Torsten Bell - said that “Inheritance Tax should be abolished.” Resolution noted that:

“it is regarded as Britain’s least fair tax. This unpopularity is due in part to it being perceived as a tax on the dead, having a high marginal rate of 40 per cent, and because it is often seen as merely a voluntary tax for the very rich and well advised.”

It obviously kills me to write this, but Torsten was right about that1.

More and more sucked in

While the rich do not pay it (unless they get unlucky and die unexpectedly or something) more and more normal people are being sucked into paying this bad tax.

Why? The threshold for paying is £325,000, a rate set in 2009, which Labour plan to keep frozen until at least 2031. George Osborne added an extra £175,000 for family homes. So a single person can pass on £325,000 tax free or £500,000 (if they have a house worth over £175,000). You can pass your allowance to your spouse, so a couple could pass on a £1m property to their kids.

But with asset prices rising and the threshold frozen, more and more people are being sucked in. There are a lot of £500,000 homes in the UK these days. Here are some examples of houses that cost £500,000.

Here’s what that gets you in Leeds:

Or in Liverpool:

Or in Swansea:

To be sure, these are solid family homes. But they are not the super wealthy.

A couple could pass on a £1m house. Here is a £1m house - the white bit. It’s really nice, but the mental picture some people have of IHT payers as living in stately homes is wrong.

And yet, some people still do think of IHT as a tax on people in stately homes. But the very rich aren’t paying. Instead, it’s become a tax for normal people who live on new build estates, not fancy people who have estates.

On average between 2001 and 2024 about 4 per cent of deaths led to an Inheritance Tax bill. By 2030 Labour will have more than doubled that to 9.5 per cent. That number is an underestimate of the impact though: around 16 per cent of families will be paying (or just under one in six).

Because spouses are able to pass on to their partners, the share of deaths paying is smaller than the number of families paying. Unless someone does something, this fiscal drag will just go on and on until we are all paying.

Growing pains

As well as being brutal on grieving families, Britain’s IHT regime is bad for growth and is driving investors overseas - meaning they take their business and all their tax revenues with them. While you can avoid paying IHT with trusts and other tax planning, people who are still actively investing don’t always want to lock up their money.

An adviser to Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel billionaire, said that levying Inheritance Tax on otherwise exempt assets resulted in him leaving the country. Chris Rokos, who was Britain’s third biggest taxpayer left the UK last month and “reportedly cited reasons including non-domiciled resident payments, Inheritance Tax concerns and private school fees.”

A 2024 survey of tax advisers by Oxford Economics found that Inheritance Tax was the most cited reason for considering migrating from the UK among both investors and entrepreneurs.

A study of the US by Moretti and Wilson find very wealthy people move noticeably away from US states with estate taxes. There was a great natural experiment in 2001 when an offsetting Federal tax credit was eliminated, meaning state-level inheritance taxes suddenly mattered - the number of very wealthy people in the states with estate taxes fell by 35 per cent. There’s also a bundle of evidence on the negative impact on family owned businesses and capital formation.

But it isn’t just losing big investors that causes IHT to be bad for growth. It creates a huge incentive for productive professionals to retire early.

Inheritance Tax at the UK’s high rate also gives people later in their careers who know they are nearing the threshold a huge incentive to retire earlier - rather than work and face this double tax. You might be paying a 62% marginal rate and THEN 40 per cent of what you take home after that. Why not retire a bit earlier rather than give three quarters of what you earn to the government?

Getting rid of inheritance tax

On the Conservative side, we believe that if you work hard and save, you should be able to pass that on to the next generation – especially the family home. The Conservative Party has always been the party of homeownership, owning a home, passing it on and giving you a stake in society is an enduring Conservative value.

Labour have been going in the other direction, abolishing important reliefs we created to protect family businesses and family farms. We have already pledged that we will scrap the family farm tax, scrap the family business tax, and we have forced Labour to scale back these things to the point where they now raise quite small sums.

But we want to go much further, so Kemi announced the following this week:

• We plan to abolish IHT.

• Given that we also need to fund defence, build more prisons and cut government borrowing amongst other things, we can’t promise to fully abolish IHT right now (because we will only promise tax cuts we are sure we have a clear route to deliver).

• So, as a first phase we will abolish IHT on the family home.

• And we will raise the threshold for other assets on top of this to 500k per person or £1m for a couple.

A lot of people seem to have missed that last bit, but hold it in mind for what follows. Our proposed new £1m threshold is a more generous increase than it looks, because at the moment most will be using up their £325k on the house value as well as the Residence Nil Rate Band, so £1m on top of full relief on the family home is a very big increase in practice.

Taking the family home out of inheritance tax

We want and plan to get rid of inheritance tax. And we thought long and hard about what a first phase of inheritance tax abolition might look like. The loss of the family home is the thing that people hate most about IHT. It is the thing that is sucking in people who never thought they would pay, and are normal people not in a position to do tax planning, and whose families are surprised to be presented with a big bill. That’s why we will abolish IHT on the family home.

We also thought long and hard about any side effects that might have and the wider context.

While we want to move quickly to abolish IHT altogether, what would happen if we had to stay in this first phase for a while?

Would people stop downsizing? Would people shift loads of assets into high end property, creating a property bubble? While we ultimately don’t want anyone to be paying inheritance tax, we don’t want to gum up the property market in the meantime.

There are several things we can do to prevent these problems.

First, we have already announced that we would abolish stamp duty on people’s primary residence. That will do more than anything else to free up the property market. Stamp duty is a much more important obstacle to people moving - research suggests that up to 2 million people would consider downsizing within five years if it were abolished. Stamp duty applies to all movers every year, so has way bigger impact on the property market than IHT will. Older people rarely move and are a very small share of transactions.2

Abolishing Stamp Duty also increases allocative efficiency, so increases effective supply, which exerts downward pressure on housing prices and costs. It’s a bit like if you shake your bin bag a bit as you are taking it out - because the stuff inside can now move around, it forms a more efficient shape with fewer gaps.

What about all those people who have masses of assets who might now engage in a property arms race to bid up the price of a large home to avoid IHT? In truth people who have loads of money aren’t going to pay IHT anyway, as they are already using trusts and other tax planning vehicles. The people who are paying it are people who bought a house ages ago and find out that it is now worth £500,000. The thing that stops them spending billions on expensive mansions is that they don’t have billions - often their home is their only real wealth.

Some people of course do have more. But we are proposing to allow couples to pass on a million of other assets as well, tax free, on top of their home. The number of people who (A) have more than a million in non-property wealth on top of their family home and ALSO (B) are not doing any tax planning or creating a trust is pretty small. As the Resolution Foundation and the IPPR have pointed out, this is an easy tax for very wealthy people to avoid - it hits the middle class and the unlucky.

Given the impact of abolishing stamp duty in freeing up the property market any impact on the property market is likely to be very small - for however long we stay in this first phase before we abolish IHT.

As it happens, there are also existing tax rules within the Residence Nil Rate Band (the thing we are increasing from £175k to unlimited) which already allow a further allowance for downsizers.

As we move into the detail of implementation then, even if all the above was wrong and it did emerge as a problem, then we could update these rules to avoid any side effects or edge cases - but I think people are wrong to think the effects are anything but very small.

What’s the cost?

The costing and analysis of this policy was done over months by leading economic analysts Oxford Economics. This is a serious firm, producing high quality work.

Dan Neidle has done a rapid reaction to the proposal overnight. He claims that the cost would be much higher and that no-one even thought of the potential side effects. This is of course silly, and these issues have been given a lot of thought.

In reality Oxford Economics have been working on this for many months - whereas Dan is doing a quick reply overnight (so the contest is a bit unfair).

But precisely because Dan is someone I like, and take very seriously, I have to say he is not right this time.

Oxford Economics spent months building a full model based on a similar bottom-up approach to that used by earlier work the IFS did (Arun Advani and David Sturrock’s groundbreaking 2023 paper). When you run their model it produces numbers that match the numbers we see in the real world - a good start!

In contrast, Dan admits his own simple model “over-predicts the number of taxpaying estates against HMRC’s outturn by about 1.6 times, and tax liabilities by about 1.45 times.”

That is where the big problems start. Having got initial numbers that are way off, Dan then just manually scales down his findings: “We use the proportional change in modelled tax and apply it to actual receipts or the OBR forecast.”

He admits “That is useful only to the extent that the errors affect baseline and reform similarly.”

But those errors in his model don’t affect the baseline and the tax cut reform similarly - because the error is likely caused by (as he suggests himself) “spending, gifts and tax planning”.

All these gaps are reduced by the tax cut - you are less likely to engage in tax planning if the tax is lowered! You are less likely to spend out or give it away too. So, the efforts he is making to scale down to get down to the right baseline need to be larger, not the same for his post-reform costing.

There are some other basic errors of fact in Dan’s piece. He says, “About 2% of older homeowners move each year (English Housing Survey)”.

But he should have read on a bit further - the English Housing Surveys in 2018/9, 19/20 and 20/21 say it is just over 1% of owner occupiers (or to be precise, 1.2% in 18/19, 1.6% in 19/20 and 1.3% in 2020/21)3

He says 36% to 47% of older movers move to somewhere smaller or cheaper - based on a report for Manchester. But the English Housing Survey 2021/22 says only 20% move to downsize. Data from EHS 2024/5 says 28.3% of those aged over 65 move to downsize.

He doesn’t appear to have noticed (and there’s no reason he would have in fairness, he’s a busy man) that we have cautiously already scored and accounted for the costs of abolishing the APR and BPR reforms (the “family farm tax” and “family business tax”) separately.

Others have also not noticed. One smart investor asked: why invest in private companies or other productive assets and potentially pay IHT, when you can put the money into a bigger house? We have already said that we would abolish the family business tax and restore the full allowance for businesses - so if you want to invest in your company you won’t be paying any inheritance tax any more anyway!

Dan thinks there would be an enormous drive to upsize into housing. But I can’t see from anything he has written what account he has tried to take of the other part of the proposal, the enormous increase to a £1m per couple allowance for other assets on top of whatever property people have.

More importantly, it doesn’t account for the fact that people with assets don’t carry their money around in cash. Take his example:

“For example, someone with a £2m house and £10m of financial investments could sell £5m of investments and buy a £7m house. That potentially moves £5m out of the taxable estate and saves £2m of inheritance tax.”

Dan appears to have forgotten that there is normally a large tax associated with turning £10m of investments into cash. For instance, if that cash attracted the maximum 24% rate of CGT, then selling £5m of investments would incur a £1.2m CGT bill. This would remove more than 50% of the proposed savings from putting the money in a house instead.

If the £10m is in a pension, then withdrawing £5m of it will incur 45% income tax. In this scenario, you’d be paying ~£2.25m in income tax to save £2m in inheritance tax. This feels pretty unlikely, even in the already rare scenario of someone in their 80s being willing to move homes.

As noted above, the number of people who are in that league of wealth and who ALSO aren’t doing any tax planning is quite small. I can’t see what account he has taken of this at all.

It is worth recalling that primary residence is already tax advantaged: free of Capital Gains Tax and already with an additional allowance in IHT, which has not caused the sky to fall in, despite similar predictions when it was introduced.

So the idea that this will “gum up the property market” in a context where you are also abolishing stamp duty is implausible - Dan doesn’t mention that context anywhere in his methodology, and it is highly relevant because abolishing stamp duty would make it easier to downsize and puts downward pressure on housing prices.

Oxford Economics respond

Oxford Economics, who did the original work have set out their response to Dan Neidle here. Amongst other things they point out that:

• The TPA’s £9.0 billion estimate is based on data taken from Wave 8 of the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) from the ONS – a version that has had its accredited statistical status suspended. For this reason, we used data from Wave 7 as our starting point.

• Estimates from our model for both IHT liabilities and the percentage of estates liable for IHT closely track data from HMRC over the 2019/20 to 2023/24 period (see section 2.2 of our report for further details). In contrast, the TPA model significantly overestimated both measures when back tested.

They also note that

TPA also model a series of additional behavioural responses based on their own judgements which significantly increase the cost of the policy. For example, their upper bound estimate assumes that 15% of households’ taxable financial wealth will shift into their main residence based on the rationale that it will lead to a 40% saving on a future IHT bill. We agree that a full residence exemption would create an incentive to shift wealth into housing but chose not to seek to model this effect due to a lack of available precedent and our view that the short-term impact (by 2029/30) is likely to be marginal, due to a range of reasons.

Firstly, primary residences are not productive assets. Over the last 10 years the average annual growth in UK house prices was around 4%, while global equities (inclusive of dividends) grew around 12%.¹ This difference plus upkeep costs and increased council tax payments (including the High Value Council Tax Surcharge) on a larger home is significant enough to mean that this decision makes less and less financial sense the longer someone lives after upsizing.

Secondly, housing wealth is illiquid, while this may not matter for the ultra-rich it will matter for many households with financial wealth above the standard nil-rate band. They will be reluctant to tie up wealth that they need to depend on in their later years.

Thirdly, the tax system disincentives this behaviour. Individuals would face a significant stamp duty bill which could be in the region of 10% of the new property’s value². At the outset, this would significantly erode the IHT savings that the individual is seeking to avoid. Furthermore, many individuals accessing the funds needed to upsize will face either a Capital Gains bill, which could approach 24%, or pay high rates of tax when withdrawing from their pension.

Finally, on a more human level, individuals in their later years will be reluctant to upsize due to emotional attachment to their homes and wanting to avoid the stresses of moving or extending their family home.

Overall, we are confident in our tried and tested modelling approach.

Conclusions

I finish where I started. IHT is a bad tax which is widely hated. We want to get rid of it, but are also conscious of all the other urgent challenges we must face - particularly defence. The first poll on our proposal shows that 61% support it and only 18% oppose it - a majority of people support it among the supporters of every political party, in every class, every region, and every age group.

Various people have subsequently popped up to try and rubbish the careful work that has been done by serious experts over months to cost this proposal accurately. Various people (including people who don’t want to cut IHT at all!) have seized on this, but these criticisms are themselves clearly very flawed.

Without much public debate or discussion Labour have stealthily set us on a course to double the number of people paying a tax which is so widely disliked - and is so dysfunctional - that even people on the left admit it has to be abolished. They want to have a greater proportion of people paying than even Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Alistair Darling ever thought was sustainable! And on top of that they want to pile on even more taxes on homes and property and are working up a third round of damaging tax increases.

A fork in the road has been reached.

Labour think that your income, your pension, and your savings are theirs to take and then hand out as they see fit. We think that if you work hard, live frugally and save you should be able to pass something on to your children.

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So today the Conservatives announced we will make a billion of savings from the DCMS budget.

Is there scope to do this? Lots. For starters, Labour are increasing their budget by £700 million.

In this piece I want to focus on just one of the arms-length bodies DCMS funds - Arts Council England (ACE). Not all our planned savings will come from ACE. But there is plenty of scope to cut wasteful spending there.

Every year, ACE gives large sums to projects which:

• Reflect the narrow obsessions of the urban left with race, sexuality and gender.

• Are built on a balkanised version of multiculturalism, and are aimed at narrow identity-politics groups, rather than a shared culture.

• Are poor value for money, could be provided commercially - and lack any clear rationale for taxpayers to be paying for them through compulsory taxation.

Simply browsing the lists of what ACE is spending on is very radicalising. It spends money in a way that is frankly on the edge of parody.

We will look at some examples of that in a moment, but before we do, hold this image in your mind:

There are men and women in my constituency getting up before dawn and working bloody hard in normal jobs. They are coming home in the cold completely knackered, and then feeding the kids or looking after their nan or washing up or taking the bins out. They are worrying about bills, and not doing lots of things they’d like to do.

Then the government is taking their hard earned money away in tax, not allowing them to spend it themselves, and instead insisting it is spent on the following things…

National Portfolio Organisations

Let’s start with the ACE National Portfolio Organisations - arts organisations, museums and libraries, who can apply for multi-year investment. The most recent published list was of the 2026/27 extension period. These include:

• £285,576 for Applause Rural Touring. Their new touring show, announced last week, is called ‘George and the Drag Queen’ and is billed as being “against a backdrop of quintessential Englishness, the show exposes the complexity of the modern debates around migration, gender identity, and community and how people can be caught between loyalty and fear”.

• £106,691 for The87Press, describing itself as ‘established on principles of equity, (late) modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, environmentalism, and social justice’. Their output includes essays on anti-colonial art, poems and lectures on Marxism. According to the Jewish Chronicle, after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 the publisher’s director, Azad Ashim Sharma asked for a “debunking” of (accurate) British media reports that there had been rapes. Their website notes that: after “a public lecture series on Marxist Theory with Sean O’Brien, the87press ascended to Arts Council England’s National Portfolio in 2023”

• £183,042 for Shubbak, whose programmes ‘support and celebrate the diversity of Arab and South West Asian & North African (SWANA) artists’ creativity and innovation’. Last year, Shubbak designed ‘An Artist’s Manual Against Apartheid’, offering practical guidance on “cultural resistance”.

• £567,257 for Apples and Snakes, which ‘develop and champion performance poets and foreground Black British artists’. Apples and Snakes were previously given £463,000 despite supporting highly political events including a “vigil for black girls and boys dehumanised in our education and policing system”.

• £163,524 for Peepal Tree Press, which describes itself as “Decolonising bookshelves since 1985”. Their website carries a statement criticising “apartheid repression by the Israeli state”.

• £64,014 for Dialled In, a festival of South Asian music and culture. Co-founder Dhruva Balram said he wanted to create a space where “brown bodies could come together and celebrate and express their creativity”. According to Hyphen magazine:

• Balram notes that they’re also very selective about the sponsors and partners they’re willing to work with. The Dialled In team is not afraid to chant “Free Palestine” at their gigs or take to the streets in support of community protest action. “If somebody isn’t aligned with us then unfortunately it’s not something that we can work towards,” Balram says.

I am trying not to editorialise as I go here, but I do find it hard. So apologies, but:

• £108,654 for Homotopia Limited, a ‘queer arts and culture festival’ based in Liverpool.

  • What about a festival everyone could go to, whether they are gay or not? What about gay people who associate the divisive word ‘queer’ with the most hateful kind of school bullies?

• £361,536 for Tiata Fahodzi, ‘a black-led, artist-centred British African heritage theatre company that is driven to support global majority artists historically excluded’.

  • There is no “global majority”. The idea that ‘all the brown people are one big group’ is crazy racism when you think about it for more than a nanosecond.

‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP)

ACE also makes awards for ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP), the fund for individual artists. ACE says it supported 1,220 individuals through DYCP in 2024/25, who received £14.2 million in grants. While not the largest amount of money, they do illustrate the absurd atmosphere within the arts world.

Some grants are straightforwardly woke and do exactly as they say on the tin:

• £11,948 for ‘Developing Queer Feminist Painting Practice’.

• £12,000 for ‘Developing my Swing Dance Practice’.

• £12,000 for ‘Learning How To Write Long Poems About Big Things (While Being Disabled)’.

• £10,408 for ‘Queer fiction and queer non-fiction writing; two book proposals, and further study in this new field for me’.

• £11,945 for ‘Send In The Clowns! Establishing a Local Clown Community’.

Others have incomprehensible names which are less clear. These include:

• £11,852 for ‘The materiality of straw’.

• £12,130 for ‘Hostile Interior Design’.

• £2,400 for ‘Curating Cursed Objects’.

• £8,837 for ‘Project Become A Badass Performer and Community Creative’.

• £13,284 for ‘My Fingertips are Holding onto the Cracks in My Foundations - Kate Nash’

National lottery funds

Arts Council England also gets given a load of the money from the national lottery. This is not a tax, but it is a stream of money controlled by the government which it could do many good things with. What do ACE do with it? Stuff that can unite everyone, right? Stuff anyone might go to? Nope.

• £48,561 for ‘Holy Show Regional Tour 2025’, a ‘queer drag comedy’, ‘exploring club culture, Irish Catholicism and queerness through stand-up, live music and audience participation’.

• £31,251 for ‘Queer Dance Adaptation of Edward II with Young People in Barnsley’. The touring production is described as ‘hormone-fuelled, spectacularly camp and aggressively poignant’.

• £99,500 to Curious Arts Ltd, including funding for ‘an action research approach to LGBTQIA+ family programmes’ and ‘Curious Festival 2026 planning’.

• £33,562 for ‘Trans Joy on Tour’; £12,450 for ‘Trans Pride Hastings 2025’; and £7,943 to Camp Trans CIC for a ‘Trans Writing Course’.

They have also awarded:

• £85,046 for a ‘Queer & Black Music Programme’ at District, a nightclub and music venue in Liverpool.

• £31,925 for an ‘LGBTQ Asylum Seeker Workshops and Audio Drama Project’.

• £30,580 for ‘Faggamuffin Bloc Party: Queering Carnival Culture & Supporting LGBTQ+ Afro-Caribbean Artists’, a ‘carnival sound system, run by and for queer people of colour’.

• £36,752 for ‘Mother Tongue: An Interdisciplinary Festival and Cultural Programme of Diasporic Queer Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Expression’.

• £29,684 to help scale ‘JEEZUS!’, a ‘Latinx Queer Musical Theatre’ project, from ‘small fringe venues to mid-scale theatre stages and a UK-wide regional tour’.

Honestly, some of the things seem like a fever dream or a Tom Wolfe-style parody of the left:

• £18,167 went to a ‘Palestinian Circus School tour’.

• £30,000 for ‘Pakistan Week’ in Birmingham - why do my constituents need to fund this?

• £10,000 was awarded to Mona Manjot Kaur Dhaliwal for an activity called ‘Re-membering South Asian Feminist Poetics’ in Brighton. Dhaliwal published a thesis earlier this year, the main argument of which is ‘that the coopting of women’s identities into patriarchal, colonial and nationalistic projects obscures histories of bordering and lived experiences of multiplicity. This overlooks the developments and insights of critical consciousness and the perspectives of feminist poetics.’

Sorry, what?

Years of rubbish

If we go back further, we can see that this has been going on for years.

In 2022, one of their National Portfolio funded organisations, Artichoke, produced a nationwide billboard exhibition which included posters reading ‘Hey Straight White Men, Pass The Power!’.

When I first saw these I was in the middle of my first attempt to make a black woman Prime Minister, so I didn’t really feel I needed a highly-divisive taxpayer funded poster to make this point.

On and on it goes, through the years.

• In 2022/23, £86,295 was awarded to the 1623 Theatre Company for Stage 1 research and development of ‘Queer Folio’, a celebration of LGBTQ+ creativity in response to Shakespeare’s First Folio. The project produced ‘30 new works-in-progress’, including ‘Othello Re:MX’, described as ‘a queer dance of Black trans identity, inspired by Othello’; ‘All’s Well’, ‘a queer gig of chronic illness, inspired by All’s Well That Ends Well’; and ‘Mucky Titus’, ‘a queer orgy of punk and kink, based on Titus Andronicus’.

• Between 2019/20 and 2023/24, Arts Canteen received £104,999 for its ‘Arab Women Artists Now’ festivals. The 2024 festival featured HABIB-TATI, described as ‘an Iraqi/Iranian-Armenian DJ who is passionate about decolonizing music’; Sabine Coucair, ‘an award-winning humanitarian clown’; and a ‘special edition of Arabs Are Not Funny’, performed by five Arab women comedians.

• In 2022/23, £71,685 was awarded for ‘The Bull and the Moon: Family Production Supporting Trans Childhood, Touring Nationally’, a ‘production targeting children and young people aged five and over who may identify as non-binary, trans or other gender denominations, as well as their families, carers and educators’. The project also offers ‘exciting activities for people of all ages to celebrate their uniqueness’, including ‘drag makeup workshops’ and ‘gender-bending tango’.

• In 2015, £14,000 was awarded to a production of ‘The Siege’, which The Spectator described as a polemic glorifying the actions of Hamas terrorists during the Second Intifada. The production’s co-director, Zoe Lafferty, said that ‘to have to engage in whether Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Brigade are terrorists is the wrong question to ask’.

• Between 2023 and 2026, Stratford East received £1.13 million annually as a National Portfolio Organisation. In 2023, it hosted a ‘Black Out’ show, at which ‘an all-Black-identifying audience could experience and discuss events in performing arts, film and cultural spaces free from the white gaze’.

This is what used to be called “segregation” - and should not be funded by the taxpayer.

Taxpayers are being made to fund things that are divisive, left wing propaganda and ultimately… rubbish. Sometimes all three at once.

For example, in 2022/23, £82,531 was awarded to Black Curatorial, whose vision is ‘to build spaces that encourage creative and curatorial growth for Black people globally’. The organisation describes its work as ‘spirit led with the intention of bunning babylon and healing trauma through immersive curatorial projects’ and says it ‘value[s] Black Epistemology and only curate[s] public events centring Black knowledge producers and creatives’. Its website also features an image overlaid with the words: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll colonise them back’.

The organisation’s founder, Aliyah Hasinah, has written about funding for Black organisations in a piece titled ‘Money needs to flow for all of us to survive’. She wrote: ‘I’m tired of little pieces of money being thrown at Black organisations’ and ‘I don’t care about whiteness. I don’t care and I have no time for the disposition of benevolence that exists within the colonial structures of foundation and grant making in the UK’. She also stated: ‘I also want reparations’, adding that ‘A lot of that benevolence money needs to go back to the Caribbean’.

In the same piece, Hasinah wrote: ‘I refuse to be beholden to the UK Charity Commission’s legislation because it’s racist, and racist in a very guided form, which I think a lot of people don’t understand as racism or classism or sexism or homophobia, and various other isms and schisms.’

Why are my constituents made to fund this?

Other examples include:

• £32,025 to ‘Climate Pride’ in 2024/25, which explores climate justice through an LGBTQIA+ lens. The organisers say this is necessary because ‘in focusing the conversation on future generations, climate activism is often explored within heteronormative worlds’.

• £20,935 to ‘Queer Pleasure Archive: Building on LGBTQIA+ Heritage’ in Newcastle in 2024/25, described as a ‘socially engaged art project and new DIY archive’ which was ‘born out of a lack of positive and joyful representation of queer people in archives and collections’ and sought to ‘delve into how Queer pleasure could be documented’.

• £19,300 to ‘Sapphic Voices’ in Ealing in 2024/25. The organisers say the Arts Council funding will ‘support the project which aims to platform, mentor and support 6 queer female and non-binary musicians in the Southwest’.

• £29,895 to ‘Crap at Animals: Engaging Local Under-Represented Communities in Biodiversity Through Play, Clowning and Outdoor Performance’ in Bristol in 2023/24, billed as ‘one guy tries heroically and fails epically to do impressions of 48,000 rare animals in under an hour’.

• £49,850 to ‘Muslim Artists Academy’ in 2022/23. Their website lists ‘modesty’ as one of its five principles, stating: ‘Dress decently and in line with an Islamic ethos’.

• £22,932 to ‘For a Palestinian’ in 2022/23, staged at Camden People’s Theatre and Bristol Old Vic. The one-man show follows the story of translator and activist Wa’el Zuaiter, who was alleged to have had connections to Black September, the Palestinian militant organisation responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympic attack.

• £44,940 in 2019/20 to ‘Mariposa, a transgender ballet reimagining of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly’, billed as ‘a truly innovative retelling of a classic opera that sheds light on the harshness of life for the homosexual and transgender community in the Hispanic Caribbean’.

• Tara Theatre were granted £422,000 to carry out projects including “Unconscious? Exploring Bias in UK Theatre”.

• The Beacon Collective were given £163,333 a year and aimed to “support organisations addressing intersectional oppression.”

There are also examples involving organisations receiving substantial annual funding as National Portfolio Organisations.

The Spectator reported that Collections Trust, which received £234,232 a year between 2023 and 2026 and £249,903 in 2026/27, shared guidance for museums which described Hamas as ‘anti-colonial freedom fighters’. (They then removed the link once it was reported in the press and said they hadn’t spotted this).

Soho Theatre, which received £614,582 a year in 2023-26, and £655,701 in 2026/27, was forced to ban the comedian Paul Currie after an incident in which he allegedly pulled out a Palestinian flag and shouted at an Israeli audience member demanding they leave, before leading chants of “Palestine will be free”. Soho Theatre described the behaviour as ‘unacceptable’ and said it ‘has no place on our stages’.

And to look forward to this weekend (3^rd-4^th of October), the Arts Council have helped fund ‘Decolonise Fest 2026’, ‘a London punk festival by and for punx of colour’, which aims to ‘decolonise punk’ and ‘put the threat back into punk again’. They note their ‘collective is made up of activists, militant community organisers, musicians, and artists’. Workshops include ‘Disrupting Exclusion: An Abolitionist Approach to Education’, ‘which focuses on the impact exclusion and oppressive education has on children and young people’, and ‘Land Back! Why We Need Land Justice, Food Sovereignty and Reparations’ which promises to discuss ‘why we need land more than ever for the revolution’.

Conclusions

I can see an argument for a government unit that looks to preserve our core national heritage. There are certain things we inherit in trust which must be looked after for future generations.

What we have in ACE is not that.

Take just one example. Our parish churches are among our greatest cultural inheritances, filled with 1500 years worth of art. Yet many are falling into ruin. The government has, naturally cut funding for the Listed Place of Worship scheme which gives VAT relief to communities who raise funds to repair churches. Clearly our actual national heritage is much less important than all the worthy projects above.

The bottom line is that organisations like ACE are run by an out of touch, out of control, left wing elite, who are high as a kite spending the money of my constituents on utter, utter drivel.

Sorry, I don’t want them to waste any more of my constituents’ hard-earned wages on this utter crap.

Give us our money back.

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I hugely enjoyed Ed West’s brilliant series of posts (here and here and here) on the English language - and the chaos and beauty that comes from its mash-up of Germanic and Romance influences.

The mixing up of two very different language families (one posh, one common) makes it hard for new learners: I am helping my son aged six to learn to read, so I feel the pain first hand.

The way English blends the speech of northern and southern Europe has helped give us a language with a dozen ways to get to the “sh” sound (shoe, sugar, tissue, mission, nation, ocean, machine, conscious, anxious, and special). Or, going the other way, a language where “-ough” has eight or nine different pronunciations1.

I am a terrible monoglot but, maybe perversely for that reason, I am a big fan of idioms and borrowed words from other languages. I guess it is nice to see the world from a different angle sometimes.

I also love the randomness of the way words and ideas move between languages.

Sometimes we import wholesale as loanwords - for example, from German we take: Schadenfreude, kindergarten, rucksack, abseil, kitsch, über, schlep and schmaltz2.

Other times we make a calque and translate the components of a foreign word (and often we then forget we did this). From German again we take:

• earworm from Ohrwurm (ear + worm)

• superman from Übermensch

• worldview from Weltanschauung

• thought experiment from Gedankenexperiment and

• swan song — from Schwanengesang3

I love the fact that "calque" is a loanword (from French calquer, to trace), while "loanword" is a calque (of Lehnwort). The snake has eaten its own tail!

In search of more idioms

Most of all, I love idioms from other places. A friend from overseas once described someone who was being driven nuts as “climbing the mirrors”, which I like a lot.

Recently I was quizzing a German-speaking friend for more German idioms. In exactly the same way that the Eskimos have many words for snow, the Germans seem to have a particular fondness for sausage-based idioms.

The idea of “Salami-slicing” tactics has already crossed over into English of course, but some sausage-based idioms which were new to me, which I particularly like, include:

"Das ist mir Wurst"

Literal: That is to me sausage - Meaning: that doesn’t matter / I don’t care. (Apparently, this is common enough that you can just say “Wurst” for short.)

“Eine Extrawurst verlangen”

Literal: Demand an extra sausage - Meaning: Demand special treatment

“Die beleidigte Leberwurst spielen”

Literal: play the offended liver sausage - Meaning: be in a huff, to act offended and wounded. (Liver sausage is not very popular)

“Seinen Senf dazugeben”

Literal: Add his mustard to it - Meaning: Give your two cents worth.

“Alles hat un ende, nur die wurst hat zwei”

Literal: Everything has an end, only a sausage has two - Meaning: all good things come to an end (but softened and made a bit surreal)

Our German cousins also seem to like other culinary idioms too - “you are getting on my biscuits” is quite a nice way to say someone is annoying, and someone with “tomatoes on their eyes” is definitely being a bit blind.

Naming the nameless thing

German seems particularly rich in single words for things and concepts that are slightly nameless. Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, Ohrwurm and Weltschmerz have already been absorbed by the giant dirty snowball that is English. But the Germans have plenty more where that came from:

Verschlimmbesserung: an improvement that actually makes things worse

Fremdschämen: the cringe you feel on someone else’s behalf when they embarrass themselves.

Kummerspeck: “grief bacon”, the weight you put on from comfort-eating through emotional distress.

Torschlusspanik: “gate-shut panic”, anxiety, often about life milestones, that time is running out and the doors are closing.

Sitzfleisch: “sitting-flesh”, the ability to endure or persevere at something tedious through sheer stamina of the backside; staying power.

Kopfkino: “head cinema”, the involuntary film your imagination screens for you, usually anxious or embarrassing scenarios playing on a loop.

Schnapsidee: “schnapps idea”, a ridiculous, harebrained plan that could only sound good to someone who’d been drinking.

Drachenfutter: “dragon fodder”, a peace-offering gift (flowers, chocolates) brought home to placate a partner you’ve annoyed.

The long compound words help for sure, but there is something about the soul of German that seems to make it a natural fit for offbeat concepts - particularly those that that combine, well, Schadenfreude and Weltschmerz.

The words above are all real and in use in German. But I feel we need more.

More German word suggestions from a non-German-speaker

With that in mind I would like to suggest, as a non-German speaker, that we need more German compound words to describe some currently nameless concepts.

I dunno if there is some academy in Bonn I can apply to, but, without further ado, I would like to request some new German words for the following concepts (my bad suggestions in German)

1. Feeling fresh, then doing something stupid that reveals you’re actually exhausted:

• der Scheinwachpatzer — “seemingly-awake blunder”

2. The large book you’d like to have read, but know you won’t read if you buy it:

• der Wunschwälzer — “wish-tome”

3. An invention that could have happened far earlier (example: wheeled suitcases)

• die Späterfindung — “late-invention”

4. The jolt of expecting a stair that isn’t there

• der Phantomtritt — “phantom step”

5. The unbalanced lurch of stepping onto a stopped escalator or travelator

• der Stillstandstaumel — “standstill stagger”

6. Too tired to stop scrolling, but too tired to go to bed

• die Scrollstarre — “scroll-torpor / scroll-rigidity”

7. Holding a door for someone just far enough away to force an awkward half-jog

• der Höflichkeitstrab — “courtesy trot”

8. The word or fact, learned yesterday, that now appears everywhere

• das Überallwort — “everywhere-word”

9. Reflexively (but wrongly) saying “you too” (when the waiter says “have a good meal”, or the check in guy says “have a good trip”)

• der Gleichfallsreflex — “likewise-reflex”

10. The name or word or memory that is utterly impossible to recall, but returns at 3am - or effortlessly two conversations later

• der Mitternachtseinfall — “midnight brainwave”

Um…

That’s probably enough new words and sausage-based idioms for now. But if you have more real idioms or suggestions, please put them in the comments below. I do love them.

After all, Alles hat un ende, nur die wurst hat zwei.

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-Old joke among Manchester politicians

“This city needs more council housing like a hole in the bloody head.”

-Senior figure in Manchester local government to the author

One of the things our new Prime Minister has traded off is a sense that he has presided over a city that is going places. Shiny skyscrapers… shiny new yellow buses… and a shiny new Prime Minister. What’s not to like?

His claim is: I can do for the nation what I have done for Manchester.

But is this quite right?

• How well are things really going in Greater Manchester?

• Where things are going well, how did that really come about?

• What was Andy Burnham’s role, after he arrived as Metro Mayor in 2017?

Is Greater Manchester doing well?

London-based Journalists head up to Manchester expecting the north to be a land of pies and prejudice. But instead of a Hovis-soundtracked landscape of industrial decline, they find instead lots of pencil thin glass towers. Many conclude that some miracle is underway.

But beyond the skyscrapers, what exactly is the evidence that Greater Manchester is doing well - or better than similar places?

Let’s run through some possible ways to measure progress.

Exhibit A: Population growth.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s we would go shopping in Manchester. It seemed like the height of sophistication and cool, but almost no-one lived in the middle of the city. Now they do. The old mills are trendy flats and pencil thin towers have shot up everywhere. And you can argue that population is a measure of success - people are voting with their feet1.

Like all our other cities, Greater Manchester has been on a turnaround curve in terms of populations - our cities shrank in the postwar years, and have filled up again since the 1990s. London shrank hardest, but rebounded first: Greater Manchester is in the middle of the pack - nothing unusual for the city as a whole.

The Manchester turnaround story is still a story about central Manchester: the area covered by the City of Manchester and Salford. Since 2011 about half of the 10 boroughs have seen their population grow faster than England as a whole, but half have grown more slowly. And for the purposes of this piece it is worth noting that the turnaround in the centre happened in the late 90s, long before Andy Burnham turned up as mayor in 2017.

Exhibit B: Building

So let’s look at the most tangible example of the Manchester turnaround: all those big tall towers. In Manchester and Salford they have built a lot - they have built faster than the England average. But the same isn’t true of the rest of the city. Roughly half of all the new building in Greater Manchester happened in just those two (out of ten) local authorities:

While the city of Manchester and Salford has built quite a lot, Greater Manchester hasn’t really built at an amazing rate. Compared to 2009 it has 10.9% more homes. England as a whole has 13.8% more. West Yorkshire has 11.1% more, the West Midlands 10.4% more, South Yorkshire 10.1 % more, and Merseyside 9.4%. So it did worse than the national average, a little better than some other urban areas, but marginally so.

And given all that population growth, arguably the real test is how well all the building has kept up.

When it comes to housing construction compared to population growth, Manchester, along with our other cities, hasn’t been doing too well - our cities stand out as red dots in the map below because their building hasn’t kept pace with population, and Manchester is no exception.

Exhibit C: Economic growth

Is Manchester experiencing an economic miracle? There was an exciting-looking uptick in productivity in the city in 2023, as measured by output per hour worked.

But city growth experts seem to think it is a statistical mirage. In a superb piece, Paul Swinney notes that there has been an implausible 21,000 jump in the number of legal and accounting jobs in one suburban neighbourhood in Trafford over a couple of years. Swinney says this “must be a data error”.

In fairness to ONS, it isn’t an ‘error’ as such: IR35 has driven lots more people to register as contractors: ONS books their output wherever their payroll is run, not where they really work. So if you have an umbrella company in Trafford that starts doing their payroll, then their output will suddenly appear in Trafford.

In the Spectator Tali Fraser notes that:

Paystream My Max Ltd, an umbrella payroll firm based there, went from 5,226 employees in 2019 to 22,213 in 2023: contractors across the country who shut their limited companies after the IR35 changes. I spoke to two of them – they work in Canary Wharf.

Paul Swinney rightly argues that to check on the headline numbers we should :

“look at data that you’d expect to move in line with productivity. Wages are a good candidate. The wages data has its own pandemic-induced sampling challenges. But if it was to corroborate this story, you’d expect there to be an increase in wages in line with productivity. As Figure 2 shows, this isn’t the case. There was no equivalent jump in pay since 2019”

He is right - earnings are the more reliable measure here. I will come back to the earnings data in a second.

But before that, we also need to ask: can we distinguish what is happening in Manchester from other cities? Across the whole country economic growth has been higher for denser areas. We have continued to shift to a services-based, laptop-based, city-centre model of growth.

The chart below shows how, across the country, dense urban areas have grown faster, whether you cut it by job density or population density or workday density (how many people live there, plus those who work there). In fact this trend is happening across Europe and beyond2. (The chart below is cumulative, so it shows you how much the densest 1% of neighbourhoods grew, then the densest 10% taken together, the top 20% and so on.)

So generally cities have seen more growth - so how does Greater Manchester compare to our other cities? Whether we look at median or mean wages, Greater Manchester remains a bit below the England average. If anything, there’s probably more evidence of rapid catch-up growth in Merseyside, South Yorkshire and Tyneside. Manchester looks neither terrible or miraculous.

It’s a similar story with mean wages:

If we look at disposable income per head our large urban areas have fallen back from the national average since 1997 and Greater Manchester is no exception:

Looking at unemployment and welfare, again we don’t see much that is dramatic. Unemployment is a bit higher than the England average. Economic inactivity rates are higher, and actually the gap has grown a bit since 2017. In England two in ten adults are inactive, while in outer boroughs like Bolton it is three in ten. Six in ten young people in Bolton are inactive.

Most of the city sees higher-than-average levels of welfare spending, though there are big differences between Oldham on the one hand, and more affluent places like Trafford. Welfare spending is lower than Birmingham or Merseyside or North London. But it is still higher than the national average: we are spending £6.3 billion a year on working age benefits in Greater Manchester.

Half time conclusions:

So then: so far we can conclude:

• The centre of Manchester has seen faster population growth and more housebuilding than the England average.

• But that’s not true of the rest of greater Manchester

• There is some exciting data about productivity…

• …But it’s a statistical mirage.

• There is no sign of wages growing significantly faster in Greater Manchester than other big cities.

• Unemployment and welfare are a bit worse than average, though not the worst.

• There is no obvious inflection point in any of this at the point where Burnham became Mayor.

How did Manchester get where it is?

But hey - there is more to life than counting people, buildings, GDP and so on. Even as someone from the other side of the Pennines I would admit the city has become better in various ways since I was a teenager - particularly the public transport.

So how did Manchester get where it is?

My then girlfriend was in Manchester town centre when the Provisional IRA detonated a 1,500 kg lorry bomb in 1996 - and the bomb is often written up as a turning point for the city. But though it led to the shopping centre being done up, in truth the city turnaround started long before then.

The real answer is complicated, and involves a mix of Conservative-era development corporations, sport-led regeneration, controversial housing policies, sustained cooperation between local authorities, and eventually a landmark devolution settlement. Two threads that run through the whole thing have been:

• a highly pragmatic approach from long-serving local leaders (particularly Graham Stringer and Richard Leese), including a willingness to work with national governments which they were ideologically hostile to.

• A very close (and sometimes controversial) relationship between local leaders and certain local property/regeneration companies

So, in no particular order, I think the big elements of the story have been as follows:

The Urban Development Corporations and links with business

In the late 1980s, despairing of obstruction from “loony left” Labour councils, and determined to regenerate the inner cities, Mrs Thatcher launched a raft of actions to try to turn things round. Spurred by the success of the Docklands Development Corporation, Michael Heseltine set up similar institutions in other cities. Labour run local governments generally hated them: they held the funding for regeneration and were set up to provide business leadership explicitly aimed at going round useless local councils.

Like many other places Manchester got two urban development corporations, which ran from the 80s to the 90s. This was an era when mental inner city Labour parties would still spit at the word business, and Manchester Labour had been gradually taken over by the left in the early 80s.

However from the late 80s on, the Manchester leadership was prepared to work with the UDCs, not just fight them: Graham Stringer joined the board of the CMDC. The city’s control of the Airport and Ship Canal also led to close working between the city and large developers - particularly Peel Holdings, Alan Cockshaw at AMEC and later Daren Whitaker of Renaker.

In the case of the CMDC, it drove developments like Bridgewater Hall, the Science and Industry Museum and the transformation of the former Manchester Central railway station into Manchester Central Convention Complex (where political parties have their party conferences). The Trafford Development Corporation catalysed the regeneration of the area around the old docks, the former steelworks at Irlam, Old Trafford and the Ship Canal. Further partnerships with developers and central government followed, including John Major-era funding through “City Challenge” to regenerate catastrophic 1960s estates in Hulme.

The Commonwealth Games and culture.

Having explored bids for the Olympics in the 80s and 90s, in 1995 it was announced that Manchester would host the 2002 Commonwealth games. The games were used to try and regenerate the east of the city in particular. Investment of about £300 million gave the city some new facilities and raised its profile. I used to enjoy seeing the monumental sculpture “The B of the Bang” on the way in from Huddersfield, but it is hard to find really crunchy economic evidence of the effects. I suppose it was one of several things that changed the vibe around the city.

And of course, the city had already become “cool” from the late 1980s, through a combination of “Madchester”, the Haçienda, Factory Records, the rise of the Northern Quarter and Ancoats and the gay village around canal street - highlighted in 1999 drama “Queer as Folk”. The BBC moved a lot of staff to Salford’s Media City in 2010-12 which also brought lots of other media suppliers to the area.

Local authority cooperation & more. In 1986 the Thatcher government abolished Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs). In the big shakeup of local government in 1974, every area had been given two tiers of government: a county council and a district or borough. The Thatcher government saw them as a pain in the arse - doing little but talk, and putting up stupid “nuclear free zone” signs. The worst offender was Ken Livingston’s GLC, but the others were seen as wasteful too. So they were (as one person wrote at the time), “zapped off the political screen like so many space invaders” (nice 80s reference).

After that, things that needed to be run in common like transport would be run by joint boards of the lower tier local authorities. In some cases relationships between councils were poor, but in Greater Manchester there was a lot of cooperation, through the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA). The snappily-named Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 allowed them to take this a step further, with the creation of a “combined authority” in 2011. Then in 2014 the leaders of the ten councils agreed to create an elected mayor for the whole city - the role Andy Burnham would go on to hold. This was a brave thing for them to do. Doing a deal with George Osborne just before an election was not welcomed by Labour in London. Even on the morning Osborne arrived to sign the deal one authority threatened to back out3.

In return the city would gain various new powers, including the ability to run London-style bus franchising and secure loan-type funding for housing and regeneration. That and the government’s idea of a “Northern Powerhouse” were helpful calling cards for the city with investors. Devolution was expanded with a series of further deals over several years covering health, fire, regeneration, rail, businesses rates, skills and homelessness. The cooperation went beyond the local authorities too - with the universities and various businesses all working hand in glove to bid for things in a way that hasn’t happened elsewhere.

Transport investment

Trams. When I first used to go over the Pennines to Manchester as a teenager, I was very jealous of their Manchester’s tram, which immediately made it feel like a much bigger city somehow. Over the period since they have built a whole network. The whole thing started in the 80s. Having dreamed up schemes including a monorail and underground tunnel, plans for a tram network were funded and legislated for under the Thatcher government. It used a mix of old railway lines and new track through the city centre. The first line opened in 1992, from Bury to Altringham. Later phases have been funded through a resourceful scraping together of money from fares, government grants, European grants, council tax supplements, and money from the airport (which the city owns). New sections opened in 1999 and every year from 2010 to 2017. The most recent section to the Trafford Centre opened in 2020 - having been given approval in 1992 (!) None of this was inevitable: contrast the horror of Leeds’ attempt to build a tram, where successive tram proposals were cancelled by central government in 2005, 2016 and 2025. There will be nothing built this parliament and opening has been delayed yet again to the “late 2030s”

Buses: In the 1980s buses were deregulated in a very different way in London compared to the rest of the country. In London, bus firms competed franchises to deliver a certain service (off road competition). In the rest of the country they competed on the road - they delivered whatever service they thought was economically profitable plus anything councils chose to explicitly subsidise. This worked fine in most places but was seen as working less well in big cities (I remember Graham Stringer bending my ear about this in about 2001). Probably the most important power in the 2014 devolution deal was the power to move to London style franchising, with the first franchises starting between 2023-25 under the banner of the “Bee network”. In 2022 the city was given over a billion pounds via the “City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement”, of which over £400 million was for buses.

Making housing affordable - not “affordable housing”

While the rest of England has 6% more social housing than in 2009, Greater Manchester has 1% less, and the city of Manchester has 5% less. How come?

The city had an explicit strategy to get more productive people to come and live in the centre. The influential 2009 Manchester Independent Economic Review (authored by the city’s in-house think tank) warned that “areas with high social housing concentrations are much less likely to improve” and that the city needed to run housing policy “to attract more skilled people from elsewhere”, with “the easing of planning restrictions which restrict availability and increase housing costs for skilled workers”.

Above all this meant not loading up new developments with massive unaffordable demands for them to contain lots of social housing - the policy which has helped drive housing starts in London to their lowest level since the second world war.

The local left have complained about this for years and argued that the city should demand that a greater share of new developments should be council housing. The Guardian and local left went into overdrive around the £1bn Manchester Life development, run in partnership with the Abu Dhabi-based owner of Manchester City football. There was also controversy about the 32-storey "Oxygen" block, with a pool and spa, built on former public land with no affordable units.

But the kind of urban regeneration that is happening in the city is more expensive than greenfield development, in a city where incomes and land values are not that high. As former local leader Richard Leese argued, many of these developments were in places where at the time no-one wanted to build anything: “If we’d tried to impose 20 per cent affordability on it, it wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have got 20 per cent affordable housing, we would have got nothing.’

There have also been controversies around the Combined Authority using its funding to make loans to skyscraper developer Renaker, with other developers unsuccessfully trying to challenge these loans in court.

Under new City of Manchester leader Bev Craig and GM mayor Andy Burnham things have moved back into a more conventional left social-housing approach, with a 2022 strategy calling for 10,000 council homes, a “Manchester Living Rent” and direct building through a council-owned company called “This City”. It is possible that with the momentum that has been created this won’t make much difference, but only time will tell.

What did Burnham do as Mayor?

The metro mayors set up under the devolution deals since 2014 are not particularly powerful - the local authorities continue to make a lot of the decisions people care about and the Mayor’s most important role is to provide leadership and use the power of the pulpit to try and get people moving or working together. What was his role?

The Bee Network.

As noted above, building the tram network had happened before Burnham arrived. The agreement to go to bus franchising had also been reached earlier, and central government put in a billion quid. But Burnham helped to shepherd the process to a conclusion and that is a real thing.

Clean air zone retreat

Under pressure from Whitehall to improve air quality, Burnham announced a Greater Manchester-wide clean air charging zone in 2021. He said: “Greater Manchester were the pioneers of the industrial revolution, now we are leading a green revolution”. But as the signs for the charging zone started to go up there was a backlash and by 2022 Burnham was announcing a pause on the charging zone, which was formally dropped in 2025.

Policing - into and out of crisis

Burnham also became Police Commissioner when he became Mayor in 2017. Greater Manchester Police was placed in special measures in 2020 after it emerged the force had failed to record around 80,000 crimes in a year. Under new Chief Constable Sir Stephen Watson since 2021 the force seems to have bounced back, with arrest numbers rising. So, on the one hand the force went into crisis on his watch. On the other hand it has bounced back.

Homelessness - progress then backsliding

In 2017 Burnham promised to end rough sleeping in the city by 2020. His “A Bed Every Night” scheme aimed to provide the offer of a bed for anyone sleeping rough. In 2017 central government also announced £30 million for Manchester to pilot “Housing First”, where street homeless people can be put directly into housing, not having to go via a period in a shelter. The pandemic drove down numbers but they have rebounded since, both in Greater Manchester and across the country. Local news outlet The Mill produced this chart.

The “MBacc” - too soon to say

In 2022 Burnham first floated the idea of an “Manchester Baccalaureate”. The mayor has (limited) oversight over post-16 skills and no power over schools. The basic idea is that “the MBacc will guide students towards subjects which will maximise their chances of getting a good job”, a create a "clear line of sight" from education to good local jobs. They have created a careers website called “Beeline”.

The ambition to have as clear a pathway on the technical side as on the academic is a good one. That was the same impetus behind “T-levels”, announced by government in 2017. But whether the MBacc will make any difference at all is hard to say.

Conclusions

The city has both changed and not changed. When I went for interview at medical school in Manchester I popped out of the building for lunch, and a guy got stabbed in the buttocks right in front of me on the street. Years later I came back to the roof of the same building as a Minister, for them to show me their plans for a gleaming new innovation district. I first met Howard Bernstein in 2008 working on a think tank project which concluded the growth in the centre wasn’t reaching the rest of the city. Writing this piece 18 years later I conclude that’s sadly still true. My take is this:

• The City of Manchester and Salford have been brave to embrace regeneration and have built quite a lot. But the way Manchester did this is the opposite of the approach that the left would approve of: involving very close relationships with developers and a strong focus on making housing affordable by building more, rather than the council housing the left prefers.

• For all the tall buildings in the centre, there is no Greater Manchester miracle. The city has lower wages than average, higher welfare spending, and as a whole hasn’t even built more than other places.

• The cooperation between the local authorities and other local leaders has been better than elsewhere for a long time.

• That, plus a pragmatic approach to working with governments of all colours has helped the city land successive waves of central government investments.

• Andy Burnham arrived as Mayor about 30 years into the process of turning around the city, and inherited a stronger set of institutions than most other mayors.

• Though it was agreed before his time, Burnham has seen through the most recent round of transport improvements, albeit with heavy funding from the last government.

• But while his other policies have not been badly intentioned, it is had to see that he has made much of a dent on the issues he has tried to tackle. This may be partly because of the powers and nature of the role, but he has also u-turned on things like the clean air zone.

• There have been lots of impressive things about Greater Manchester over the last 30-40 years, and some strong leadership from Stringer, Leese and Bernstein. But sadly there has been no miracle - and Burnham is no miracle worker.

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This post looks at whether the extra money has worked in one particular bit of the NHS: in dentistry.

The summary version is this:

• Less dental treatment is being done on the NHS than before the pandemic.

• The big geographical variations in access to NHS dentistry that already existed have got bigger - and show no signs of closing.

• The recovery that was happening after the pandemic has ground to a halt.

• And once you factor in a growing population, the picture looks even more stark, with less provision per head.

Let’s walk through that.

How much NHS dental work is being done?

Every month the NHS publishes information on how much NHS work each dental practice has done, and how many NHS patients they have seen. The unit of measurement of their output is the “Unit of Dental Activity” (UDA).

The more complicated and time-consuming a bit of work is, the more UDAs are awarded,1 and the more the NHS pays the dentist.

So how much activity is happening where?

Here is a comparison (not per head) of the amount of NHS dental work over the last year (to March 2026) compared to the year to March 2019. I’ve aggregated the numbers to the district level.

As you can see, the map is mainly red - in most places there is a lot less activity happening now. That is particularly the case in the shires - the south west, Norfolk and so on.

These are point-to-point comparisons though.

The chart below shows what happened over time. To smooth out the choppy movements from month-to-month, the chart below shows a 12 month rolling total. As you can see, things fell off a cliff in the pandemic, and then recovered.

But that recovery has ground to a halt - at a lower level - about an eighth lower than pre-pandemic. And that is before you account for population growth.

Activity per head - and the growing gaps

The really striking thing is when you look at the variation between places. There were always gaps in provision, but those gaps have got bigger.

The chart below shows activity per head2 in each Integrated Care Board (ICB) over time. Some places see more than twice as much NHS dentistry per head as others:

And below is the same data, but as an index value - how much it has changed since the pre-pandemic era. Overall, there is 16% less activity per head than pre-pandemic.

And the fanning out is even starker. While nowhere is delivering as much NHS dentistry per head as they were pre-pandemic, the growth in the gaps between places is enormous - London hasn’t changed much, but Somerset is seeing about 60% less activity per head, which is pretty mind-blowing. And while some places seem to be recovering a bit, others are flatlining or falling further.

If we turn that chart back into a map you can see the rural-urban split pretty clearly - urban areas are down a bit, but rural areas are down a lot, particularly in the south west:

Possible reasons

Why do we see these variations? I don’t think there is a definitive answer, but parts of it include:

• The funding formula: As well as different areas getting different total amounts from funding formulas, each dental practice also gets paid different amounts per UDA. These historic rates reflect the patient & treatment mix that practice had in 2005 - and they were sprung on dentists as a surprise back then. Over time rates are becoming less and less anchored to any reality. Where funding and UDA rates are lower, delivery is generally lower.

• Dentist demographics: Dentists generally qualify in cities and anecdotally younger dentists are less inclined to move to shire areas. Vacancy rates are much higher in shire areas.

• Choices of the local ICB. Different ICBs have put more or less priority on dentistry and been more or less innovative in encouraging NHS dentistry.

• Willingness and ability of the population to go elsewhere. To some extent there is more scope for NHS dentists to move to do more private work in places where people are more willing or able to pay themselves to get seen.

Policy

When I was responsible for this area as a minister I worked on a comprehensive set of proposals to try and fix this - some of which saw the light of day after I left, and other bits didn’t.

In so far as there has been a focus dentistry at all, Labour seem to have focussed on access to urgent appointments. In 2025 Labour promised to deliver 700,000 extra urgent dental appointments, funded from underspends. But data I got from the department shows they didn't deliver any meaningful increase, and now they have quietly abandoned the target.

Some more substantive things are happening: in December the government announced new payments for complex care pathways for people with serious problems (which have been hard to manage in the current system). There is a new requirement to deliver urgent appointments as standard, and support for preventative activity.

Nonetheless, dentists continue to press for a more fundamental overhaul. Responding to the reforms above, the British Dental Association said that “a decisive break from this target-based contract remains key, and these changes do not constitute a final destination for NHS dentistry in England” … “These are the biggest tweaks this failed contract has seen in its history” (a double edged comment) “but this cannot be the end of the road”.

The Oral Health Foundation said: ‘The proposed reforms acknowledge some of the pressures within NHS dentistry… but they stop short of the fundamental change the system requires.

The government is currently saying that, “We remain committed to delivering further, fundamental reform of the dental contract before the end of this Parliament.” We will see.

Conclusions

The data above shows that there is a lot less NHS dentistry happening than pre-pandemic - and even more so once you consider it per head. Variations between similar places have hugely increased.

Hopes that all these problems would simply be washed away by a wall of money under the new Labour government seem to have been dashed.

Money is important but so is reform: many dentists argue that the basic NHS dental contract is dysfunctional, and sets broad price bands that often don’t match the real cost of work. Escaping from the bureaucracy of the NHS is one big motivator for many dentists to go private.

And this is another great example of the incredible variations in performance within the NHS. People often present the NHS as a homogenous monolith, but in reality similar places see very different levels of service, and accountability for local underperformance is very weak. That needs to change - even if NHS reform is a bit like pulling teeth.

Share

“total returns [on going to university] will be negative for around 30% of both men and women.”

The IFS have recently updated this work, looking at the same cohort of students - people who did their GCSEs in 2002 and graduated in 2007.

We now have several more years of earnings data for them, and the IFS now find negative returns for 32% of those same graduates (25% women, 36% of men)1.

Not being worth it for a third of students is bad: it implies that taxpayer’s money and students’ time is being wasted.

But actually, that 32% could be an underestimate.

This piece explains why.

Preamble: choices, choices

Before we start, a key thing to know up front is that how much men or women are likely to earn after university depends mainly on three things - what subject you did, where you studied - and what your prior attainment at school was.

Graduates from some subjects see low earnings whatever their level of prior attainment. Subjects like arts, media studies and so on lead to low average earnings - even for those who did well at school.

In contrast earnings for graduates of other subjects vary massively by prior attainment.

Subjects like Computing, Economics, Law, Business etc lead on to high earnings for those with high prior attainment - but low earnings with low prior attainment. That wide variation appears as long grey bars are in the chart below:

So, it’s worth holding this in mind as we think about outcomes for the “average university student” - there is no such thing! And a lot is about your prior attainment.

With that preamble over, let’s get into it, and look at some of the reasons why I think things may be worse now even than the IFS report’s headline finding.

1) Declining graduate premiums - driven by more students with low prior attainment

The new IFS paper is looking at some pretty old students - people who were born in 1985, took their GCSEs in 2002, and graduated in 2007.

In other words, the IFS work is looking a long way back in time. Since then, graduate premiums have fallen quite a lot, driven by the expansion of higher education.

The IFS have continued to look at that older cohort because they are wary of too much extrapolation. Even with the extra data they have gained six years after the first report, that only gives them people’s actual earnings to age 37 - the rest has to be extrapolated. So it’s not unreasonable to look back in time - the business of writing such reports turns on making these trade-offs.

But the problem is that two big things have changed since 2007.

• The gap between graduate and non-graduate earnings has narrowed a lot. (we often call this the “graduate premium” - though how much of it is actually just a “smart person premium” is a key debate)

• While the share of kids going to university has not changed so much at the top of the distribution - the share has been transformed in the bottom half.

And it turns out the rising number going to university with low prior attainment and the falling “graduate premium” appear to be linked.

Let’s put some numbers on both those changes. For a girl right in the middle of the achievement distribution at GCSE, between 2002 and 2018 the probability of them going to university by age 21 went from less than 20% to about 50%. And of course, even that is old data - the share going to uni has gone up further since then.

As more and more have gone to university, the gap between graduate and non-graduate earnings has declined.

There are different ways to measure this. The chart below (M.1.) compares all people of the same age who did and didn’t go to university. The IFS describe this as “including those for whom higher education is not a realistic option” - though as noted above, increasing shares with low prior attainment are in fact going.

As you can see, the earnings of the graduates are higher. That is unsurprising, as they typically did much better at school.

But the earnings gap between the graduates and non-graduates is falling over time.

At age 26 the raw premium for women declined from c 80% for those doing their GCSEs in the early 2000s to under 60% for those doing their GCSEs in 2013, and there is no reason to think this trend stopped or slowed down in 2013.

This is a key reason why, when IFS find that university wasn’t worth it for 32% of those who did their GCSEs in 2002, that share may be much higher by now.

If you re-plot the charts above, but exclude those with lower prior attainment, you don’t see the same clear decline in graduate premiums - so the decline appears to be all about sending more people with low prior attainment to university:

Low prior attainment

And what about those people with lower attainment? The IFS paper makes a crucial choice. They look only at about 40% of pupils - the top of the prior attainment distribution.

They also screen out various others, including those with a SEN statement or EHCP at age 16, which is obviously a rapidly growing share of pupils - currently around 5% of young people have an EHCP.

For the 2002 cohort they only look at those who achieved at least the points equivalent of five C grades in their top eight GCSE exams. Here is what that does to their sample:

What they are trying to do is screen out data problems - people who go to university who apparently had low GCSE results may have actually be unrepresentative in some way, or data glitches. Including SEND students might distort things. I totally get why they have done it.

But that exclusion gives you a new problem: once you cut off the bottom half you have fewer people in the sample not going to university. And they too might be unrepresentative in some way, or data glitches.

All this must be born in mind when we look at graphs like the below from the IFS - this is in fact not the bottom 35% but the bottom 35% of the top 40%.

We can directly observe these graduates’ outcomes up to age 37 - I have drawn that point in as a red vertical line. After that is a projection - IFS read across from higher attaining cohorts and assume their future earnings will shoot up in a similar way later in their careers. But the key question is: will they really?

Looking at the period we can directly observe, (to the left of the red lines) we see that the average woman in this group saw an individual positive return by 37, but a negative return once you include the costs to taxpayers. We see that the men in the group have seen a negative return as individuals as well as a negative return for taxpayers. A lot turns on the hope that things will turn round for them later as they do for historic graduates with higher attainment.

And what would the numbers look like if the IFS work was updated to stop screening out those with lower prior attainment - and we could bring the figures up to date?

The share with negative returns would surely be much higher in those groups, and that 32% figure would be higher.

Accounting for hours worked - and kids

In the above I have talked casually about “graduate premiums” and whether university is “economically worth it”.

In reality it is very very hard to work out the impact that university has, compared to other unobserved facts about graduates. The IFS are trying to control for prior attainment - and as noted above, even that is very tricky. Attempts to prize apart the impact of university on “human capital” from “signalling” effects more broadly are nigh on impossible.

The IFS work just looks at overall earnings - they dataset they are using doesn’t contain hours worked. But a recent paper from a team lead from UCL suggests that is a big part of the story:

Recent evidence using administrative earnings data from England suggests a zero return to graduation for men and positive returns to graduation for women in annual earnings at age 26. We show that once hours worked are taken into account – typically not available in administrative tax data – returns to graduation in hourly wages are considerably smaller for women than returns in annual wages at this age. Graduate women work more hours than comparable non-graduate women; thus, not taking hours worked into account leads to overestimating returns to graduation for women by more than two-fold.

Higher per-hour productivity is (other things equal) an unambiguously good thing.

But working more is more ambiguous: is working more hours something we should consider as a benefit of graduating - or is it a variable that we should be controlling for to work out the benefit?

There is a wider issue here. We know that for women, the point at which they have do or don’t have children has a huge impact on their earnings:

And higher education correlates with both later childbearing and lower rates of childbearing. Even older cohort studies found that average age of entry to motherhood was five years later for women with higher qualifications than for those without. A study of women born in 1970 found that first-in-family graduates were 40% more likely to be childless at 46 than their university-educated peers.

So how much of the “graduate premium” for women reflects later / lower childbearing - and how should we regard that in the analysis? This would be a great extension to the dataset that IFS are working on.

Conclusions

The series of papers on graduate returns which the IFS have produced are superb - and hats off to them for their work. The finding that university was not worth it from an economic point of view for nearly a third of 2007 graduates is very striking. It should lead to a change in policy. In fact, it has already influenced the Conservative pledge to re-introduce number controls on higher education, and use the savings to fund more high quality apprenticeships and the abolition of of real interest rates on Plan 2 student loans.

But there are good reasons to think this may be an underestimate of the problem. The graduate premium had continued to decline since 2007, and as the IFS turn to later cohorts, they will need to figure out what to do with people with lower prior attainment who are now going to university. We can see that some of the apparent earnings premium is not higher hourly productivity, but more hours being worked - and that female graduates are more likely to be working more hours due to lower/later childbearing.

The further dramatic expansion of mass higher education in the 2010s was justified by analysis of average graduate earnings premiums which now look very crude and misleading. As the analysis gets better we see more nuance - but overall, the picture is looking worse and worse.

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The story got a bit lost because of the chaos around Keir Starmer’s departure, but it’s a really big deal.

There are three separate new immigration routes being created this year:

“A new community sponsorship scheme will allow communities to sponsor refugees to resettle in their area, taking responsibility for housing, integration and supporting them into work.”

Currently a small number of refugees are sponsored in communities under the UK Resettlement Scheme (UKRS) but the vast majority are supported by councils.

The named community sponsorship model will sit outside the UKRS and operate at a much higher capacity once established”

As the government say, we already operate a “community settlement scheme”, where sponsor groups are able to bring over refugees if they can raise at least £9,000 and commit to two years of housing and support per family. Presumably such rules as there are will be relaxed as part of the new scheme.

In addition, a new “study route” will let “trusted universities” sponsor refugees directly.

“trusted universities will be able to directly sponsor refugees through a study route. Applications will open this autumn for organisations to sponsor refugees, with the first arrivals in autumn 2027.

This model will form the future of safe and legal routes. The Home Office will work with ‘lead sponsors’ to accredit them and these will need to be organisations.”

We have not yet been told what would qualify a university as “trusted”, and what incentives institutions would have to take on such people - though it is worth noting that people on such humanitarian schemes can get student loans. With universities keen to increase their numbers that may be incentive enough.

In addition to community groups and education institutions, employers will also be able to sponsor migrants outside the “skilled worker” route:

“A refugee work route is expected to open next year, allowing employers to sponsor refugees.”

Again, the mechanics are unclear.

The Home Office has also not said how many people it expects to be brought over via these routes. It has, however, pointed to the Canadian model this is based on, which it says has “successfully resettled almost 400,000 refugees”. Ministers have also the comparison with the Homes for Ukraine scheme, where “more than 270,000 Ukrainians have been welcomed into local communities”.

Despite this remarkable lack of transparency, we are told that the rollout of the first two routes will begin this autumn.

Why is the government doing this?

Earlier this month, Andy Burnham visited Dover to discuss the issue of illegal immigration. There he told the press that “people want to see this issue addressed, but we also need to build a system that offers safe routes for people as well, because that also takes away the selling point of the gangs.” (my italics).

This is the key point. The idea has kicked around on the left for years that you could solve illegal immigration by simply… making it legal.

It has also been briefed to the media that this scheme is designed to prioritise the nationalities most associated with small boat arrivals:

“Refugees likely to be prioritised under the scheme will be those identified as most in need from countries such as Sudan and Eritrea, whose citizens account for the largest number of small boat arrivals.” (The Times, 26 June 2026)

Why this will not work

Demand to move to developed countries like the UK is near unlimited compared to our capacity to absorb it. Billions of people would be radically better off if they moved to the UK or elsewhere in Europe.

Over the last couple of years 4,725 people from India have been detected crossing illegally to the UK.

This is despite the fact that India is the number one nationality for legal migration into the UK, that India is the world’s largest democracy and a booming, emerging superpower with a successful space programme.

Its a good example of how unless you are prepared to have totally open borders (which few advocates admit openly to supporting), then any “safe and legal” routes will have either a limit, or there will be countries to which they do not apply, at which point the people not included will still seek to come illegally.

In fact it may well be counterproductive - there is such a thing as chain migration - the more people from a place come to your country or town, the more likely it is that further people from that place will want to come. So if you have some people who come via the new “legal” routes that will create more demand to get to the UK.

It is not clear what kinds of organisations will be able to sponsor migrants, but I would assume that faith groups like churches and mosques will be able to do so. As Canada has discovered, the dynamics of “community sponsorship” tend to lead to a degree of balkanisation as ethnic enclaves are deepened and different groups bring over more members of their own community.

The pull factor

Ministers have said that the numbers resettled through the scheme will “start small and build over time”.

For context, under the existing community settlement scheme, 597 people were granted resettlement between 2021 and 2025. Against that, in July of this year, 750 people arrived by dinghy in a single day.

This means that if the government hope to divert some of these people into “community sponsorship” rather than asylum then the new scheme will operate with an almost immediate backlog.

The Canadian experience proves this point neatly. In November 2024, the Canadian government paused new applications to two of its community-based sponsorship schemes to deal with a mounting backlog. The pause was extended again the following year, when data emerged that there were over 100,000 applicants still waiting for a first-stage decision.

This is hardly surprising, when you consider that the UNHCR definition, which the government have adopted to judge eligibility for the scheme, qualifies tens of millions of people worldwide for resettlement. Britain, like Canada, is considered to offer pretty generous terms to those who arrive here, which puts both our countries high up that very long queue.

The difference between us and Canada, however, is that there is not a well established route for illegal immigrants to break into their country via small boats running in parallel. Canada is able to pause the scheme and effectively manage new entrants. In the absence of any meaningful action to end illegal crossings, there is no reason to think that people already prepared to pay smugglers thousands of pounds will instead join a queue that would take years to clear.

For those who are not genuine refugees wanting to come to Britain, who can afford to pay a smuggler, the Channel crossing remains an attractive route, especially given how unlikely removal actually is - nine out of ten people who make it will stay.

Without addressing these factors, the new scheme’s effect on the pull factor is close to nil. These new routes will not meaningfully reduce the number of people willing to cross by small boat, and it will add tens of thousands of additional refugees for the state to house, support and integrate on top of them.

Counting the cost

In June, the Home Office published its own estimate of the lifetime fiscal cost of asylum grants made under one of the most common articles of the ECHR, the right to a family life. This came to £141,000 once any tax contributions are netted off. Others put the cost much higher - an independent report by the University of Amsterdam put the cost at around £400,000 each.

Either way, once we reach the tens of thousands being resettled via this route, even a broadly similar per-person lifetime cost would run into the low billions, on top of whatever continues to be spent on the tens of thousands still arriving by small boat each year.

There is also a further point that the government have been reluctant to engage with. Ministers have tried to spin this new scheme as being analogous to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine, asking voters (and community sponsors) to ignore the massive difference between the nations which we are proposing to accept.

It is the job of the government to weigh whatever moral obligation we may have, against the realities of the cost, financial and otherwise, of accommodating people at this scale. Ministers’ refusal to engage with the fact that refugees from some nations are likely to commit violent or sexual crimes at a significantly higher rate, is a dereliction of this responsibility. For example, the Centre for Migration Control have estimated that Afghans are 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than someone born in Britain. The now-infamous leaflets handed out by the Home Office to asylum seekers underline the point: not all cultures are equal and some of the nationality groups that will be encouraged to come via this scheme both have and create many more problems than the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

In recent months, there seems to have been a steady stream of cases of crimes of the most horrific nature committed by those whom we had extended our generosity towards, or who had entered illegally and could not be removed. The uncomfortable reality of what the government is proposing, is that there are likely to be many more such instances.

Conclusions

The rationale for these new schemes rest on two comforting fallacies indulged in by the those on the left. The first is that opening “safe and legal routes” will reduce the incentives for those attempting channel crossings, despite the fact the evidence from the Canadian model demonstrates that demand will always outstrip supply whatever capacity is built for it.

The second, is the assumption that the goodwill the nation showed towards Ukrainian refugees can simply be transferred, uncritically, to any other nationality or route of arrival, as though the cost of integration is the same regardless of who is arriving or how.

It is the same sleight of hand Labour used on asylum hotels, where MPs attempted to characterise objections to the asylum hotels, being about the hotels specifically, rather than the unvetted men housed within them, and claims to be “solving” it by quietly moving people into HMOs in suburban streets instead.

Here, the pretence is that the objection to housing those from Sudan or Eritrea, is that they arrived by boat - rather than the fact that we will be spending billions of pounds to accommodate people who will make our communities less safe.

Without meaningful action to prevent illegal entry, all this new scheme will achieve is to add a new, parallel stream of arrivals - on top of the illegal crossings that the government is failing to control. The public want control of our borders, not even more routes which will simply add to the problems.

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Debates about abortion tend to focus on the gestational age at which abortion is legal. These are important debates. I wrote before about the vote to effectively allow abortion up to birth, which I think is totally wrong.

But if there is a missing dimension to the debate about abortion I think it is this:

• There are people who do not really want to have an abortion, but do not feel they are in a position to bring up a child.

• There are are another group of people who would like children and cannot have them - and specifically there are people who would like to adopt a baby but will not adopt older children.

These people could help each other (and the baby), but it doesn’t happen. Why?

• The adoption of babies has dwindled to almost nothing

• There is a feeling in the system that the priority should be to try and persuade people to adopt hard-to-place older children

• There is no support made available to people to keep their baby and then give it up for adoption.

I will come back to why this might be - but first, let’s have a look at the numbers.

The end of baby adoption

Here’s the number of babies (children under a year old) who were adopted every year, and the number of abortions, both for England and Wales.

Baby adoption has gone massively down as abortion has gone up. It is hard to believe that the one hasn’t played any role in displacing the other. Having been on the increase, baby adoptions fell rapidly after as soon as abortion was legalised, and are now close to zero.

Those are different scales but you can see that in the 1960s about 12,000 babies were being adopted every year, and last year it was just over 100.

There are about a thousand babies a year who go into kinship care with relatives - something which has always been there, but has been formalised over recent decades.

And it’s true also that adoption of older children has also declined - but not to the same extent. Adoption of older children actually went up before it went down, and about 4,000 older children are still adopted each year, even has baby adoption has effectively ended. Compared to 1962 number of older children adopted is down 50%, but the number of babies adopted is down 99%.

And of course, the end of baby adoptions has come despite a population which is about a quarter bigger than in 1968.

Much higher rates of abortions are seen in poorer places. I made a Freedom of Information request to the ONS about this. The proportion of conceptions ending up in abortion is now over a third in the poorest 10% of neighbourhoods, compared to 26% in the richest tenth:

And because all neighbourhoods contain a mix of people, the correlation would likely be stronger, and the curve even steeper, if we looked at the individual circumstances of the mother, not just their neighbourhood. It seems clear that material factors matter in the decision to have an abortion or not.

What we could do

Seeing these numbers it is hard not to think there must be some opportunity to help both those do not want to have an abortion, but do not feel they are in a position to bring up a child and also help those who want to adopt a baby.

Let me start by being super clear. I am not proposing that we force or pressure people into doing anything. In the past there were people who could have been good parents and wanted to keep their baby, but were forced to give it up. That was awful and the last thing I would want.

My focus here is squarely on those who are making a choice. As an aside, it is worth saying that for those children who do sadly have to be taken into care, the evidence is now that this is done too late not too early: a 2014 survey by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) found that social workers thought only 5% children they had dealt with had been taken into care too early, compared to 39% too late.

But as I say, my focus is on those making a choice. There are some women who don’t really want to have an abortion, and don’t feel they have a good alternative to abortion. Given the higher rates in poorer places, it seems likely that material and practical factors play a role in this feeling.

Let me also be clear: I am not dissing people who adopt older children or damning the prospects of those children. Far from it: these people are total heroes. We know so people who adopted older children and were warned they would never develop properly - maybe never speak properly. But despite this, they have actually caught up and bloomed with new parents who love them.

And yet, as Jigsaw adoption note: “Many people come to adoption hoping to welcome a newborn, and it's a natural hope — particularly for people who have been through fertility treatment. But the reality of UK adoption is that babies are uncommon”.

There are a potentially large group of people who would adopt a newborn, but not older children. But they don’t get that chance any more.

The idea

Isn’t it time that we gave women considering abortion another option? More choice? At the moment we have a system that doesn’t really even ask people what they want or present them with any option to get help and support to have a baby.

It is no small thing to be pregnant and then give birth. But it is no small thing to have an abortion either. Shouldn’t we find a way to give another option to women who might not want an abortion, but can’t look after a child? The practical help and emotional support to get through a difficult time?

At the moment the debate seems lopsided. For example, the Commons voted to allow abortion up to birth without sanction. Those babies will need to be delivered anyway if aborted. In light of this, it seems mad that we haven’t haven’t had any discussion about helping women in that position keep their baby to term and then have him or her adopted.

The offer of another choice would need the most sensitive handling. And there would be a cost of course. And lots of people wouldn’t want to do it - but some would.

Shouldn’t we find a way to give them an extra choice?

NB

This is a personal post - it’s my view rather than a Conservative policy.

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But in between times the data we have is really very poor, lacking even the basic information you’d really think we should have. We have for example, no estimate of how many people of different nationalities are currently in the country.

This post aims to use three other data sources - on jobs, births and schools - to update our picture of how the country has changed in the five years since the census, focussing on the issue of migration and demographic change.

Before we launch in, I want to say at the top - I have worked with (and been friends with) people from all over the world - including people of pretty much every ethnicity and religion. This post is not a criticism of anyone, or any group of people. But our society is seeing some huge and rapid changes which we should recognise and talk about. And as we will see - different places are having very different experiences.

Employment

One of the strongest pieces of data we have outside the census is from HMRC’s Real Time Information dataset on employment. The published data shows us that the share of employments held by people who were not UK nationals when they first got a national insurance number has increased to over 20%, driven by a growing share of non-EU nationals:

I used Freedom of Information to get this data broken down by local authority, and have now used a new FOI request to get it updated to the end of 2025.

The map below shows the change in the share of all employments held by non-UK nationals over the last five years. As you can see, a lot of the biggest changes since the census have been in mid-sized cities and towns: Preston, Middlesbrough, Coventry and so on - smaller cities which stand out as dark dots below. Perhaps surprisingly, inner London hasn’t actually changed so much:

Here’s the same data as a scatterplot. A lot of the biggest changes have been for places that had middling levels of non-UK nationals in the workforce in 2021. Places like Brent and Westminster still have more non-UK nationals in the workforce, but the change since the census has been smaller there, while changes have been pretty big in places you might not think of as particularly diverse: Middlesborough, Sunderland, Dundee, Preston, Gloucester - and so on:

Don’t get me wrong - if we look at the level not the change, London still has far more non-UK nationals in the workforce than other places - over 60% employments in Newham now. But the relative difference may be more apparent to local people when Sunderland goes from 5% to 13% or Middlesbrough from 10% to 24% than when Westminster goes from 52% to 53%.

Births data

Let’s turn to look at another solid data source. There is effectively a “census” of babies every year, with good data from ONS.

It shows that the number of babies born to women born in the UK has fallen a lot and is at a record low. The number born to mothers from abroad has increased a bit and the mix has changed too in recent years there have been fewer from the EU, and more from the rest of the world:

The share of babies born with at least one migrant parent reached 40% for the first time last year, driven by a fall in the number of kids with two parents from the UK.

Obviously there are different numbers of women in the UK who were born in and outside the UK, so to understand the trends we might want to look at birth rates too.

ONS did produce data on fertility rates of women born inside and outside the UK, but had stopped - so I put in a freedom of information request to ONS to get them to update their work. The updated data is shown below. As you can see, the fertility rate of women born in the UK (of all ethnicities) has hit a new record low.

The impact of previous migrants is not enough to give the UK a stable population and that gap between UK born and non-UK born parents is likely to increase the rate of demographic change over time.

The gap between the two seemed to have narrowed in about 2016 - but has widened out again since.

What do these numbers mean? Well, at a TFR of 1.41, every 100 people will have 50 grandchildren, and at 1.96 they will have 96 grandchildren, so this birth rate difference, which might sound small, will actually bake in a lot of change for the coming decades:

Again, we see quite an uneven change across the country. And again we see that areas with middling shares of parents born abroad in 2021 generally saw the biggest increases in recent years - places like Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Lincoln and Bolton.

Here is the same thing on a map - again the smaller cities and towns stick out. Bits of Inner London actually see a smaller proportion of babies with a parent born abroad, while Outer London sees more.

Again, don’t get me wrong, when we look at the levels, not the change, London still has radically more children born with one parent from overseas - 84% of those born in Brent for example. Likewise in the other big cities - 61% in Birmingham and 65% in Manchester have a parent from overseas. But again, the change may feel greater in some of those smaller places.

School census

Finally, lets look at a third data source.

Schools collect detailed data each year on their pupils. In 2017 an attempt was made to start collecting information on which countries kids were from, which would have allowed us to look at the impact of migration directly. But there was an organised campaign to block the collection of this data, with hard-left activists saying that mild-mannered Education Secretary Nicky Morgan was awful for even wanting to know this information.

So instead we will have to look at slightly less direct data, on the ethnicity of pupils. Interestingly, the surge in migration over recent years isn’t really visible in this data - instead we see the continuation of the previous trends. This may be because the large number of recent arrivals don’t have children of school age yet?

The share of parents describing their children as white British is falling, and the share identifying with an ethnic minority or mixed ethnicity is rising. This year’s data is the first time the share of pupils who are white British is below 60%. The trend is pretty linear - if the trend of the last couple of decades continues, white British pupils will be a minority by 2036. That’s not far off - those starting school this year will still be at school then.

This change is not uniform across the country. Whether you look at it either in absolute or proportional changes, the big demographic changes in schools have not been in the inner urban areas that already had a lot of minority ethnic pupils in 2021.

Again, the big changes have been in mid-sized cities and places that have not been particularly diverse to date: Middlesbrough, Bolton, Doncaster, Warwickshire and so on - shown in red below. The shires are seeing nearly as big a change: Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Cheshire etc are shown in orange below (this map below makes the size of all authorities proportional to their population by the way).

To some extent the share cannot really fall much in inner London because it is already so low - just 5% in Newham for example. But on the other hand the change is not purely a reflection of the prior level - in fact the biggest changes have been in areas that had middling levels of diversity back in 2021. It’s that same curve again, perhaps clearest of all here:

Consistent with the u-shaped curve above, quite a few of the places where schools will become majority-minority in the next few years are not places that are thought of as particularly diverse:

And to make the same point one last time for completeness, the change is of course not the level. London continues to have far more pupils from ethnic minorities - only 7% in Harrow and only 5% in Newham are white British:

Can we make wider inferences from this?

Each of these data sources is valid and solid and shows you the change, and it is interesting that there is a similar trend visible in all three - the most change is happening in the middling sorts of places.

I did wonder if we could use the three more up-to-date sets of data to make inferences about what is happening to different areas overall? Could we use this to update the census data?

Sadly, not with any confidence. Comparing the data on births, pupils and employments even for 2021 to the 2021 census we find big variations - even when we compare school pupils to the school age, and employments to the working age.

Though it is the gold standard, the census itself has about 3% of people imputed and a further 1.3% not answering the question on ethnicity. The census itself was somewhat warped by being done in the tail end of the pandemic. Some British people temporarily moved out of London in 2020/21 and flowed back in again later, and migrant movement patterns were different.

School pupils move around and cross borough boundaries - or move out to the independent sector - compared to census 2021 the schools census implies there are fewer white British kids in inner London and the centres of other cities like Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. Elsewhere, it implies there are more.

There is a correlation between census data for how many people live in a place and the employment data for those who work in it - but it is a fuzzy correlation. One reason is that different ethnic minority groups have radically different rates of employment in different places - e.g. the share of employments among British people is probably higher than you’d expect given the demographics of adults living in Birmingham, and it’s lower in Oxford and Cambridge - this is probably because in the west midlands you have ethnic groups with low employment rates, and you have lots of students not working in Oxbridge. So we can’t project out wider conclusions from these three sets of data with any confidence.

Fiscal change

While this piece is mainly about the demographic change in different places, I thought I would quickly look again at whether the fiscal position of different groups has changed since the census - have the large numbers of new people arriving given us a big fiscal boost?

The only really comprehensive data is from ONS, The Effect of Tax and Benefits. Other analysis, for example by by the Migration Advisory Committee doesn’t cover some migration groups yet.

The ONS data is not broken down by migration status - only by ethnicity. And the sample size is limited. But there is no suggestion from it that the dramatic demographic changes described above have led to a major fiscal boost.

ONS only publish some large aggregate groups, and told me they can’t break it down further (e.g. by disaggregating “Asian” or “Black”), because of the sample size.

But it remains the case that the only ethnic group which has a net positive fiscal contribution is the white group. Asian, mixed and “other” ethnic groups have become more negative over recent years since the census. Black British people saw their position decline then improve a bit, but the balance remained pretty negative.

Conclusions

Data on employments, births and school pupils gives us an updated sense of what demographic change is meaning for different parts of the country.

One interesting trend that I had not clocked before is the tendency for places “in the middle” to see the biggest changes.

Looking at the data above also reveals the incredible demographic change that has happened in my lifetime, and the breathtaking pace of change in recent years.

The “economic argument” for mass immigration has completely collapsed - the UK and other countries have seen incredible rates of immigration and it has not proved to be remotely the economic rocket fuel that migration boosters claimed. Instead we have sky high rents and dire productivity. Given the numbers from the ONS above, I’m sceptical that the long term impact of immigration has been a big fiscal boost.

But there is something beyond the economic argument here. The incredible scale and pace of the changes makes the case for not just tweaks to migration policy but a fundamentally different approach, which starts from zero. Yes, the UK can and should obviously deport all foreign criminals - and obviously we should not allow people who are welfare dependent to remain or become citizens - that’s a no-brainer. But also, though it has come down a bit, legal migration is still just far too high. With 703,000 non British people arriving during 2025, that’s still huge change every year.

Within cultural elites, many people think that the view of many voters - the view that “I would prefer it if members of my group continued to form a majority, and continued to set the tone for how things work here” - is racist.

I don’t agree. You can get on with many types of people and avoid pre-judging people and enjoy other cultures, and yet still prefer your area and your country to be mainly full of people like you. People who have some history in your culture, rather than a transient hotel-like country with an ever-shifting mix of strangers.

There is even a sort of citizen-of-the-world version of this argument. We want France to be France, Spain to be Spain, Japan to be Japan. I think it is legitimate for some places to limit foreign tourists for example. We don’t want to visit another country only to find that it has become just the same slew of Starbucks and identikit buildings that you could find anywhere in the world. Britain is no different.

On the Conservative side we have said that our cap will see sustained net negative migration. Looking at the data above, it is not hard to see why so many people want mass migration to end completely.

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I wrote before about how to recreate an orderly and civilised society. Getting rid of graffiti would be my first step.

They say that what gets measured gets managed. But so far we aren’t even measuring the problem!

There is no good public data on how much graffiti there is in different places. Nor are there any good stats on how many people are punished for doing it. Graffiti offences are bundled up with other things in the published stats - the Ministry of Justice's court-outcome data is broken down by offence category (e.g. "criminal damage under £5,000").

As the broken windows theory goes, these visible signs of public disorder and lawbreaking create an environment in which serious crime becomes more likely, as well as making our lives, and the places we live, more miserable. We need to start doing something about it.

So I submitted Freedom of Information requests to every London council, asking for the number of recorded instances of graffiti and the number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued.

First, let’s look at recorded instances.

In 2025, London’s councils recorded just shy of 100,000 instances of graffiti between them, across the 30 out of of 32 councils that provided me a figure. This is more like the amount of major instances or graffiti cleaned up than it is the total amount of new graffiti. But that’s still a lot every year!

Here’s what that looks like when it’s mapped:

Regular readers will note that this looks a lot like the welfare map of London which appeared in a previous post:

When it comes to graffiti, Hackney tops the leaderboard, with 13,613 recorded instances, followed by Kensington and Chelsea on 7,235, and Enfield on 6,149. At the other end of the scale, ten councils recorded fewer than a thousand instances across the whole year, with Redbridge on only 244.

Much of this variation reflects genuinely different recording practices between councils. For the most part, what’s captured as a “recorded instance” appears to be graffiti that has already been cleaned, rather than graffiti that has simply been reported or observed. For example:

• Hackney council note that 12,662 internal reports came from ‘graffiti crews’, who ‘proactively report and remove graffiti and tagging during their rounds’, while 501 reports were submitted via the Fix My Street online reporting tool, as well as calls and emails from the public.

• For Hammersmith and Fulham, their figure, 6601, represents ‘the number of jobs completed’. For Lambeth, their figure, 3207, ‘reflects reports raised on the council’s case management system’.

Given this pattern, it seems reasonable to assume that if a council has recorded an instance of graffiti, it has also cleaned it. So the 100,000 figure is therefore probably best read as a proxy for the number of instances cleaned, not the number of instances that actually occurred.

Is anyone being prosecuted?

A more comparable statistic is the number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPN) that councils have issued for graffiti offenders.

Remarkably, given the scale of graffiti recorded, there have been only 77 FPNs issued, with Southwark accounting for over half of these on its own, issuing 40.

Twenty-one councils issued none at all, not including Lambeth and Croydon who refused to provide a figure. The City of London and Westminster both confirmed they do not issue FPNs for graffiti at all. And Camden and Greenwich issued one and two FPNs respectively, but generated no revenue from either, because neither were ever paid.

In total, London’s 77 FPNs generated just over £10,000 in revenue.

These are pretty measly figures when you consider the cost of the operation to clean up 100,000 graffiti sites a year.

Conclusions

Lee Kuan Yew’s great book “from third world to first” reveals the care he took to improve the public realm in Singapore - from greening the city to banning gum. He did this partly for its own sake, but partly because he knew it would make the city more attractive to businesses and mobile workers. We need to learn the lesson.

As the figures above show, there are currently almost no consequences for graffiti offences. Only 0.08% of graffiti incidents ever receive a fine, and even then, it can be as little as £65.

For the majority of councils, there seems to be no attempt to punish the people who are doing this. In some cases, this is a matter of practice, in others, it seems to be a lack of enforcement capacity. Either way, councils need to do better at restoring consequences and a functioning deterrent.

Secondly, as well as improving the public environment, the swift removal of graffiti is a deterrent in its own right.

On the Conservative side, we have already announced changes to community sentences that would help make this possible. We would make unpaid work a universal requirement for all offenders, end the practice of serving community sentences from home (!), and strengthen penalties for those who fail to complete their sentence. The increased numbers of hours available would be directed at cleaning up litter, graffiti and grime in our town and city centres, as well as creating a visible deterrent.

The decline of our public spaces is not inevitable. Councils and central government already have the power to punish this - but clearly lack the will or resource to use it. It’s time we started treating these offences with the seriousness they deserve.

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Why?

This article is the result of five separate rounds of Freedom of Information Requests and Parliamentary Questions, so I apologise that it is quite data heavy.

Executive summary

• In 2019 the Home Office estimated that between 3.5 million and 4.1 million people would be eligible for EU settlement. But as of March 2026 4.4 million people had been granted settled status and a further 1.5 million held pre-settled status - so 5.9 million in total.

• Over 160,000 “late applicants” have been granted settled status since the deadline of the 30th June 2021, along with a further 54,000 family members joining them - so 220,000 people. 124,000 people applying after the deadline got pre-settled status, with 202,000 family members joining them1.

• In the past 12 months alone, around 66,000 completely new applicants gained residency via this scheme, five years after the deadline.

• Some nationalities are much more likely to apply. At least one in every 20 Romanian citizens has settled or pre-settled status in the UK.

• Rather than tailing off as you’d expect, both the number of late applicants and joining family members actually rose sharply in the last quarter.

• EU citizens granted settled or pre-settled status via the EUSS are able to bring family members under conditions much more favourable than those available to British citizens bringing their spouses or children. They face no salary test or language test or fee, and extended family members can be brought over, not just direct family.

• In the past 12 months, there were more EUSS applications from Indian (15,164) and Pakistani (9,318) nationals, than from French (9,178), German (6,009), Belgian (2,467) or Dutch (5,003). In total there have been nearly 50,000 grants of settled status to Indian nationals via the EUSS. Indian nationals are now the second-largest nationality among new applicants.

• People on EUSS are eligible for student loans.

• In 2024/25 foreign nationals received around £4bn in student loans. One in five people getting student loans were non-UK nationals. 5% of all first time student loans in the UK went to Romanians alone.

• The government has no grip on the losses on these loans.

• Even if non-UK nationals were as likely as UK nationals to repay, we would expect to lose 30% of the £4 billion a year.

• But in practice, almost all nationalities have a repayment rate significantly lower than UK nationals. We can see from new data I obtained that the average repayment rate for non UK nationals is just 51% - much lower than the UK repayment rate (68%).

• This means that UK taxpayers are losing between £1.2 and £2.2 billion a year on loans to non-UK nationals - probably more like the latter.

• Losses on loans to Romanian nationals alone probably cost around £650m a year.

• As well as any eventual losses from people not earning enough, the British taxpayer is already owed £1.5bn by a total of around 50,000 overseas “non-compliant” borrowers. “Non-compliant” nationals from tiny Cyprus alone (with a population similar to Leeds) owe over £300m.

How on earth did we get here?

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In the beginning

As part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement signed in January 2020, the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) was set up to allow European nationals residing in Britain to apply to stay here permanently. The deal was: we don’t disrupt the lives of people here - and they don’t disrupt the lives of Brits abroad. Fine.

EU nationals were granted either pre-settled status or settled status, depending on how long they had been resident in the UK before the end of the transition period on the 31^st December 2020. People with pre-settled can later move to settled.

In practice, settled status functions as a more generous form of indefinite leave to remain, in that it granted immediate access to the NHS and welfare, while also granting foreign nationals family reunion rights which are more generous than for British citizens.

This is a crucial point in the story.

To bring a family member to the UK, a British citizen must meet a £29,000 minimum income threshold. The family member must pass a Secure English Language Test and pay nearly £2,000 in application fees, with the visa initially granted for under three years.

EUSS joining family applications are free, permanent, and open to extended family members. British citizens can only sponsor partners, children, and adult dependents.

So someone with EUSS has great ability to bring more people to the UK.

This is pretty remarkable in and of itself, but arguably, these concessions were a necessary price to leave the EU. However, we are now a decade on from the Brexit vote, and five years on from the deadline to apply to the scheme, and people are still getting new grants in their tens of thousands.

So what on earth is going on?

EUSS: the big picture.

First, it’s worth looking at the scale of this scheme.

The Home Office Impact Assessment for the EU settlement scheme published in March 2019 stated that: “the total number of EEA citizens and their family members eligible to apply for the EU Settlement Scheme by the end of the planned implementation period on 31 December 2020 is likely to be between 3.5 million and 4.1 million.”

But as of March 2026 4.4 million people had been granted settled status and a further 1.5 million held pre-settled status - so 5.9 million in total2.

This means that, in part because of the unlimited number of family members those who received grants were able to bring, each of the top six nationalities receiving settled status has received more grants than the number of passport holders from that country recorded as resident in Britain in 2021.

For Polish nationals alone, grants of settled status have already exceeded the 2021 passport holder count by nearly 200,000.

The door is still open

Five years on from the application deadline, you’d expect most of these grants to have been awarded long ago, and for applications to have ended. Remarkably, this isn’t the case.

In the past 12 months alone, 440,000 applications to the EUSS were processed.

Now, most of these applications are what’s known as “repeat applications”, where people are moved from pre-settled status (temporary) to settled status (permanent). This represented around 275,000 applications, with the majority being granted. But that means there were still 165,000 other applications. How come?

First, there are those who are applying late. The Home Office say that they assess these applications on a case-by-case basis, considering “reasonable grounds” for missing the deadline. The numbers suggest that this interpretation is a very generous one - in the last 12 months over 36,000 late applications were successful, with only around a half of all these applications refused.

I have asked the Home Office for a breakdown of why so many late applications are still being allowed - but they refuse to say. Surely the window for reasonable exceptions has long passed.

Second, there is also a route open for family members. The only requirement for EU citizens bringing their extended family is having settled or pre-settled status, and saying that the relationship with the family member predates 31 December 2020. There is no cap, and no fee, on how many family members can be brought over. There is also no deadline for joining family members to apply via the EUSS, and in the last 12 months, around 30,000 family members were granted settled or pre-settled status via this route.

Between these two routes, around 66,000 completely new applicants gained residency via this scheme in the past 12 months. And this number is now beginning to rise. The chart below strips out people moving from pre-settled to settled status.

Alarm bells

The longer it is allowed to continue, the further the scheme drifts from its original purpose. And several things in the data ring alarm bells, and suggest it is being abused.

If you missed the deadline by a week that would be one thing. But missing by five years and still being waved through is another.

There’s no reason some nationals should be worse at remembering to post the letter. And yet we see that while for countries like Germany or France, roughly a quarter of grants of settled status have come since the deadline, for Romania it is nearly half. For non-EU citizens (mainly family members joining) it is higher still, at 54%.

We can also see that later cohorts are more likely to be dominated by family members.

Over 160,000 “late applicants” have been granted settled status since the deadline of the 30th June 2021, along with a further 54,000 family members joining them - so 220,000 people, and a quarter are family members.

124,000 people applying after the deadline got pre-settled status. They are people who are less far down the track, likely later cohorts. They have 202,000 family members joining them. So 62% are family members for this mainly-later group.

Then there is the growth in the number of applications from countries outside the EU. In the past 12 months, there were more EUSS applications from Indian (15,164) and Pakistani (9,318) nationals, than from French (9,178), German (6,009), Belgian (2,467) or Dutch (5,003). And in total, non-EEA nationals now account for more than 20% of all new applications.

It’s not just applications but grants. Nearly 50,000 Indian nationals in total have gained settled status since the scheme opened. For context, this is more than double the number of grants given to Danish citizens (23,793) and comfortably more than the number received by Belgian citizens (30,769).

While the majority of these grants will be to those joining family members, government figures show that there have also been more than 2,000 Indian nationals who applied successfully in their own right as late applicants. How on earth is this being allowed to happen3?

Another clear outlier in the data is the volume of applications coming from Romania. In the last 12 months alone, there were nearly 120,000 applications concluded from Romanian nationals, more than triple the next highest, from Italy, at 37,000. As a share of the population, applications from Romania are about five times the average rate for the EU.

One possible explanation is that Romania grants citizenship and a Romanian (and EU) passport to neighbouring Moldovans if they have ancestors in Greater Romania, and this has been the basis of years of scams linked to this route. But there may be other reasons.

Although around half of applications from Romania are repeat applicants (i.e. those moving from pre-settled to settled), nearly 56,000 are new (i.e. those applying as late applicants or joining family members). And of these new applicants, around 16,000 were successful.

Why does this matter? The link to student loans

It seems that people are increasingly gaming the system and it is drifting away from its original intent. Why does this matter, beyond increasing immigration?

As we have already seen, a grant of EU settled status unlocks a whole host of privileges including access to benefits, the ability to bring over family members free of charge and the immediate use of the NHS.

Perhaps less well known is the access granted to the British student loan system.

From academic year 2021/22, new EU students in England (without a ‘settled’ or ‘pre-settled status’) were no longer eligible for tuition fee funding.

But those with EU settled status become eligible for tuition fee and maintenance support on the same terms as a British national. Those with pre-settled status can access tuition fee support after three years, and the full maintenance loan as well, if they or a family member is in employment.^.

After much back and forth with the Student Loans Company (SLC) I have begun to uncover some of the scale and costs involved.

In total, if we look at unique individuals who received their first ever loan from the Student Loans Company, there are just over a million non-UK nationals who have received UK student loans, 423,000 of which have been in the last five years. Given that EU students without settled status are no longer eligible for loans since 21/22, you might have expected the share of loans going to non-UK nationals to fall dramatically. But it’s actually gone up a bit:

In the 2024/25 academic year alone, there were 160,941 foreign national borrowers with EU Settled Status and 34,879 who were classified as EUSS Migrant Workers. A further 24,344 were eligible via standard Settled Status or Indefinite Leave to Remain. (There are also a whole host of smaller residency categories which qualify foreign nationals for loans).

A separate dataset breaks down the number of students and the total amount loaned by nationality rather than immigration status.

In the same academic year, some 280,000 foreign nationals received loans^[5] worth over £4bn in total.

The breakdown by nationality also shows some trends that suggests people have learned to play the system. For example, Romanian nationals are receiving loans at a completely unprecedented rate compared to their EU counterparts.

In less than a decade between 2016 and 2025, the number of Romanians receiving loans each year has grown nearly eightfold. In 2024/25 alone, 86,000 Romanian nationals were loaned a total of £1.3bn. While grants to Polish people have barely moved in the last five years, grants to people from Romania have doubled. The number of borrowers from Romania has gone up each and every year:

It is the same trend if we look at the amount borrowed each year:

If we look at first-time borrowers last year, non-UK nationals now account for a fifth of all loans handed out and a similar share of the value. Romanians alone account for 5% of all UK student loans:

What’s the problem?

The whole purpose of the student loan system is to invest in people who will build careers here and repay through higher earnings over time.

People who are not UK nationals are more likely to leave, so British taxpayers’ investment will get up and walk out the door.

This would be an issue even if we were sure borrowers from overseas were as likely to repay from abroad - we are no longer getting the social benefit.

But there is a practical problem. Loan repayments are deducted automatically from UK payslips. There is no equivalent mechanism to recover money owed from those who move abroad, and repayment rates are far lower.

How much will not be repaid?

The government has no grip on this. For student loans as a whole the government publishes measures of how much of the money it expects to get back. For example, around 30% of all the money lent to full time undergraduates is scored as public spending, because it won’t be paid back.

So even if loans to non-UK nationals were paid back at the same rate - 30% of £4 billion a year would mean a £1.2 billion subsidy being paid by British taxpayers to people who are not British.

But this 30% figure isn’t broken down by nationality. In response to my Parliamentary Question, the government published what it considers to be the “repayment rates” for student loans, broken down by nationality.

In simple terms, this shows what percentage of borrowers who are past their Statutory Repayment Due Date made a repayment in the financial year, broken down by nationality.4

The chart below sets out this repayment rate against the amounts loaned last year. This shows that the most significant borrower nationalities have repayment rates far lower than British nationals. Overall, the weighted average repayment rate for non UK nationals is just 51%, substantially lower than the UK repayment rate (68%).

The official student loan forecasts are that around 30% of all new (Plan 5) student loans will not be repaid (that’s including UK and non-UK borrowers).

The government publishes two similar measures called the “RAB charge” and “transfer proportion” which describe the cost to taxpayers of this expected non-repayment - the difference between the two is about how you measure interest costs.

As a result of this 30% expected loss, the government scores £8-9 billion a year of student loans as spending rather than simply lending.

Given their lower repayment rate, the share of losses to the taxpayer accounted for by non-UK borrowers is likely going to be bigger than their share of borrowing. On the basis of the weighted average above non-UK students are 19.3% of new borrowing - but more like 27% of non-repayment.

If we apply that 27% to the expected losses on student loans (£8.3 billion overall in 2030/315 ) then on the face of it, the cost to taxpayers of losses on lending to non-UK nationals could easily be £2.2 billion a year.6

More detail on variations by nationality

Of the seven nationalities who received more than £100m in student loans, four had a repayment rate of less than 50%, including Romania, which received £1.25bn despite a meagre repayment rate of 45%. This implies that losses on loans to Romanian nationals alone probably cost around £650m a year.

The bubble chart above only includes the larger nationality groups. If we include some of the smaller borrower groups we see even lower repayment rates. The repayment rate for Kuwait, for instance, is at 17%, while only a quarter of liable borrowers from Cyprus repaid anything at all:

Why aren’t non-UK nationals repaying? Are they not earning enough? Or have they vanished?

It looks like it’s a mix. We have also been able to extract data from the SLC on the number of, and amount owed by, overseas “non-compliant borrowers”.

The Student Loans Company say of them that:

“Non-compliant customers are those that are in repayment status, have a balance outstanding, and have not made a repayment in the last 12 months, excluding those with an agreed repayment arrangement in place”

On that definition, there are currently 54,537 non-compliant overseas borrowers from EU countries, and they owe a combined £1.5bn. This is money we may be unlikely to see again.

This figure is itself likely to be an underestimate, for two reasons:

• First, it excludes “unverified customers,” which refers to overseas borrowers whose current financial status SLC cannot establish at all^[2]. A recent FOI by journalist Matt Davis put this figure for EU borrowers at 42,000, owing nearly £893m. SLC caution that not all of these are necessarily liable to repay, some may be unemployed, on benefits, or between jobs, but the category is growing and the outstanding balance has more than doubled since 2020/21.

• Second, the data we have on “non-compliant” borrowers only capture those who have moved abroad; UK-settled foreign nationals who fail to repay are not reflected here at all.

Even with these caveats, the scale of non-payment for those who we know are not repaying is shockingly high for some nationalities.

Cypriot nationals, for instance, are recorded as having over 10,000 overseas non-compliant borrowers, against a total of only around 27,000 Cypriot borrowers since 2005 (so 37%). This is so high that I double checked it with the SLC - but it is correct. In total, the bill from non-compliant Cypriots who are now overseas is more than £300m.

Conclusions

The EU Settlement Scheme was designed to give certainty to people who had made their lives here before Brexit, and enable the same for Brits in Europe. It quickly achieved that aim, and as a result the lives of millions of EU and British citizens were not disrupted by Brexit in the way some had suggested they would be.

However, we are now five years on from the deadline, and the system is riddled with signs of abuse. I am always the first to say that the last Conservative government should have been tougher on all aspects of migration, and this is no exception. But at least in 2022 or 2023 I can see how ministers might have looked at the data and thought this scheme was going to tail away. But when applications are rising in 2026 you can’t possibly defend it.

Shabana Mahmood has always been good at managing the media, and I guess she benefits from a contrast with the most extreme open-borders people in Labour. But really.

It’s not just that that she is preparing to import tens of thousands of people from Sudan and Eritrea to try and fiddle the figures on the small boats. She is also presiding over a system in which new EUSS grants are beginning to rise, fully six years after Brexit. You don’t have to be an immigration sceptic to think that’s nuts.

Non-EU nationals are taking advantage, and countries with less rigorous citizenship processes are now dominating the applications.

It is time to draw a line under this. The government wouldn’t even need new legislation to end new EUSS claims tomorrow. They just need to stop having an absurdly generous over-interpretation of rules. The fact that the Home Office won’t release any information on the reasons why these new claims are being accepted is very telling.

The same logic should apply to family members. If you want to bring over a partner, you need to prove you were in an established relationship at the end of the transition period, on 31 December 2020. So if you are showing up suddenly asking to bring over your girlfriend six years later, Home Office officials need to start being a bit more sceptical.

Likewise on student loans. If European citizens long-established in Britain, who were going to stay here wanted to do a serious degree and repay, that would be one thing.

But my worry is that too many of these people will leave and not repay, or are getting the loan to top up their income while mainly working and doing a bit of studying. My worries are compounded by the facts that (a) I can see the DFE are not even measuring the problem, and (b) the data I can get from FOI and PQs looks really bad.

If we stop the flow of new EUSS claims, the flow of EUSS student loans is likely to dry up too. And we should stop giving student loans to non-EU people with ILR too.

We can then end any remaining abuses with a wider crackdown on low value courses. Even for UK students there’s a long tail of students doing low quality courses who won’t repay. The Conservatives have said we will reintroduce number controls and shut these courses down.

To conclude: we simply cannot afford for Home Office officials to be this “generous” in handing out tickets for a scheme carrying so many entitlements to benefits, student loans and and so on. It is insane that new claims are going up six years after Brexit.

The cost of just one aspect of this, the student loan system, puts the cost into perspective. Foreign nationals received £4bn in student loans in the last academic year. Yet DFE has no idea how much of this we will get back or not - but we could easily be losing over £2 billion a year on loans which we should not be making.

This is not right, not fair, and not sustainable.

It’s time for this loophole to be closed, and this scam to be ended.

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Particular thanks to James for his dogged pursuit of the FOIs and WPQs in this article.

-Mark Twain

He’s finally resigned. But the Arday scandal revealed the rot in higher education in several ways, and involved:

• Cambridge University giving a professorship to a fraudster and fantasist, based purely on his skin colour and absurd stories

• A large number of academics coming out to defend him - even after it became totally clear he was a fraud.

• The University first saying the complaints were bogus and a “vile campaign” - then being utterly paralysed and unable to respond, even as their reputation went up in smoke

• Arday being empowered to use lawyers (and the police!) to intimidate journalists

• Even more people becoming aware of the utterly worthless nature of too much of the “output” of the non-STEM parts of our universities.

Tom Wolfe couldn’t have invented Arday. Nor could the late David Lodge have written a more on-the-nose satire of contemporary universities.

While the intimidation of journalists, the waste of public money and the reputational disaster for Cambridge are all very serious, one of the things that makes it so disastrous is… it made them all look monumentally stupid and gullible.

And nothing can withstand a gale of laughter.

Here is Arday’s boss Hilary Cremin gushing to him: “We are so lucky to have you… you are the best in the world”.

Watching this display of fawning stupidity kills me. I love universities. I am naturally a universitophile. My parents didn’t go to university, so my siblings and I were the first generation. When I went to Oxford I loved it.

And lots of wonderful things still happen in our universities - particularly on the STEM side. There are scientists and other real scholars in our universities who we should revere. There are bits of HE I think we ought to expand.

But, but but… there is just so much garbage now. Watching Cambridge (failing to) grapple with the Arday case was like watching one of your best friends end up on heroin and living in a skip. Its tragic. You still love them, but you know you have to help them get off the smack.

And let’s face it, the Arday case is hardly the first spectacular disaster in higher education:

• In 2022 we learned about the Manchester PHD involving masturbating to Japanese child porn.

• We had Prof David Millar at Bristol, who who denied the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, disputed Russian responsibility for the 2018 ­Skripal poisonings and said jewish students were “pawns” in a zionist conspiracy.

• We had a Sunday Times investigation found millions being fraudulently claimed by people with no intention at all of studying, prompting the Education Secretary to refer it to the Public Sector Fraud Authority.

• The University of Liverpool agreed to rename Gladstone Hall - instead of the great Liberal Liverpudlian statesman, it now celebrates Dorothy Kuya… a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Britain.

• We had the Grievance Studies Affair, where academics deliberately published absurd papers in journals, including, “"Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” (in Gender, Place & Culture) and "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant" (in Sex Roles)

I could go on. But the spectacular disasters don’t really explain the problem. The problem is the vast flood tide of badly written zero-value guff.

Stuff that would be described as “woke” is part of it, but there is just much that is pointless - read by no one, and of use to no one.

In government and in Parliament I would often go looking for academic evidence and find that stuff just wasn’t being produced on things that would actually be useful. A handful of academics produced must of the useful stuff.

Meanwhile academia produces reams and reams of work on its own obsessions - particularly the increasingly monomaniacal obsession with issues around race, gender and sexuality.

Let’s be clear. The stuff Arday produced is utter garbage. But it isn’t unusual garbage. Here is one of his. He produced loads of this sort of stuff:

“Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro-aggressions within the Academy,” Whiteness and Education (2018)

This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling [sic] method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds [sic] within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. (p. 141)

This is purest word salad. But in contemporary academia that’s not unusual.

Charlotte Gill runs a whole website cataloguing the nonsense. And a brief search of thesis titles reveals how much of this there is. In the space of five minutes scrolling I noted theses including:

• “The unladylike ladies of roller derby? : how spectators, players and derby wives do and redo gender and heteronormativity in all-female roller derby” (University of York)

• All that glitters is gold : queering waste through campy craft (Loughborough University)

• “The politics and aesthetics of decolonial queering in Palestine” (Durham University)

• “Lifescapes of a pipedream : a decolonial mixtape of structural violence & resistance along the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline” (Oxford University)

• “Transgender gaze, neoliberal haze : the impact of neoliberalism on trans female bodies in the Anglophone Global North” (University of Edinburgh")

• Decolonizing the camera : photography in racial time (Durham University)

• “Coloniality, (body-)territory and migration : decolonial feminist geographies of violence and resistance among Latin American women in England” (King’s College London)

• Boyish aesthetics : images of the boy from ‘Peter Pan’ to contemporary female-to-male transgenderism (University of Manchester)

• “Awaken dreams : decolonising participatory art through communal friendship” (Goldsmiths College)

I could go on and on…

How did we get here?

If this blog has any theme, it’s about putting numbers on things. So lets look at the following questions.

• Have universities really become more focused on DEI stuff, or is that a myth?

• If so, when exactly did things change?

• Are we “past peak woke” in our universities as some claim?

I’m going to use a simple metric to look at this, and just look at the number of (mainly doctoral) thesis papers each year which contain terms in the title which people would describe as DEI or critical theory-related (see annex for the full list of terms).

We can use two different data sources to put numbers on this.

• EThOS, the British Library's e-theses service. EThOS was the British Library's national database of UK doctoral theses: a single catalogue that recorded every PhD awarded by a UK university, gathered from the universities themselves. The British Library published periodic snapshots of the whole thing as a downloadable spreadsheet. The sample size averages around 14,000 theses a year across the 1990s to 2010s, rising to roughly 19,000 by 2022. Its weakness is that it stopped: a cyberattack in October 2023 ended collection, so the data only reliably runs to 2022.

• Individual university repositories. Via a protocol called OAI-PMH, we can get more up to date data from individual repositories and aggregate them. Here I have drawn from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, York, LSE, UCL, Warwick, Southampton, and the Open University. The sample size is smaller - about 8,200 a year over the last three years - but the advantage is that we can go nearly up to the present day.

What do they tell us?

The rise of EDI and critical theory in British academia

We obviously need to control for the growing total number of theses being published and look at a the rate of EDI-related titles as a share of all theses. I haven’t excluded fields like physics or maths where you are unlikely to find such terms, so the share is obviously quite small.

Here I have just looked at titles not abstracts or papers - this is intended as a simple proxy for wider trends.

Of course a thesis may be a load of DEI garbage and not have one of my search terms in the actual title. So while the numbers are not huge - this is the tip of a much larger iceberg.

As you can see - a strongly growing share of theses contain EDI/critical theory terms in the actual title.

The larger sample size on EThOS explains the less choppy line. But the trends are more or less the same in the two datasets. Screening for only doctoral theses makes little difference:

My 13 chosen repositories come from more elite / more research intensive universities which I suspect are more STEM heavy - I suspect this is why the rate is about 20% higher on the wider EThOS dataset. If we had EThOS data for the last couple of years I suspect the rate will have risen to about 270 ish by 2025 in the chart above. The data for 2026 showed a huge spike - but I have not included it here because the data for this year is only partial so far - and there may be some selection bias driving that spike.

It is worth noting that there’s a timelag here - people publishing their thesis in 2025 probably started in 2021 or 2022 - so, a bit like in astronomy, we are looking into the past.

Which particular ideas and terms are driving this EDI growth? Well, if you are still talking about “feminism” and “the patriarchy” those are still big on campus, but you are probably an old-timer. Hotter EDI terms now are things like “intersectional” “queer” and “autoethnography”. “Transgender”, “decolonising” and “whiteness” are very big too.

Projecting the EThOS data forward to 2025, UK universities are now probably publishing about 400 theses a year with these terms in the actual title. Generally a doctorate takes about 3-4 years to write, so that is a huge amount of life-years being spent on writing these things. Many multiples more will be on similar themes, even if my search-words aren’t in the actual title.

And think of the zillions of journal articles and research projects in HE which are similar. Is this all a good use of taxpayers money? Is it a good use of people’s lives?

Conclusions

Academics have studied somewhat pointless stuff for a long time. Even in Lucky Jim (1954) Dixon's article, “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485” satirises the narrow and pointless quality of much academia. And it is true that sometimes you don’t know what might be useful.

But it is often clear what will definitely not be useful. And the charts above show there is proportionately a lot more EDI / critical theory rubbish than ever before in academia.

People like Jonathan Haidt and Eric Kaufmann have done a good job of explaining the purity spirals which have gradually taken the norms of the university world further and further from the rest of society.

We are in an ageing society with nothing but hard fiscal choices ahead of us for the rest of my life. People can see that a lot of garbage is being produced - that the HE emperor has no clothes.

And unsurprisingly, taxpayers’ don’t want to waste their money on this rubbish any more.

Annex: the terms searched:

Variations of each were searched - a * indicates wildcards

• BAME

• EDI/DEI phrase

• LGBT*

• X justice

• ableism/ableist

• allyship

• anti-racism

• autoethnograph*

• cisgender/non-binary

• coloniality

• critical race theory

• decolonis*/decolonial

• epistemic injustice/violence

• eurocentri*

• feminis*

• gender identity

• gender-based violence

• global south

• hegemon*

• heteronormative etc

• inclusive education/practice

• indigenous

• intersectional*

• islamophobia

• lived experience

• marginalis*/marginaliz*

• microaggression

• minoritis*/minoritiz*

• misogyny/sexism

• neoliberal*

• neurodiver*

• othering/otherness

• patriarchy

• positionality

• postcolonial

• precarity

• privilege (social)

• queer*

• racialis*/racializ*

• reflexivity

• safe space

• settler colonial*

• social justice

• subaltern

• toxic masculinity

• transgender/transsexual

• unconscious/implicit bias

• whiteness/white privilege

For this piece I have drawn on the open data published by the police which lists outcomes for each recorded crime, together with a geographical location for most of them. It is a huge dataset but - partly for that reason - I have never seen it well visualised.1.

Since May 2023 there are 13.9 million individual crime outcomes published, of which 13.7 million have a geographical location. These crimes are divided up into 35,672 neighbourhoods (LSOAs) across England and Wales2, which contain roughly similar numbers of people. The data is updated over time and tells us what the eventual outcome was for each crime.

Only 9.7% of crimes led to criminals being charged. Another 4.1% got a caution or an equivalent (like a drug warning, or fixed penalty), but that’s still just 13.9% getting either charged or cautioned. Of the rest, the bulk were recorded as

• 42% “Investigation complete; no suspect identified”, or

• 40% “Unable to prosecute suspect”

So clear-up rates are disappointing nationally - but there are places where they are particularly low.

Local variations

Here is how the proportion of crimes that led to a suspect being charged varies between different neighbourhoods. There is no data for Greater Manchester because they’ve had IT problems. And I’m going to start by excluding London, as that makes the trends elsewhere clearer.

In the map below, the red areas are the third of neighbourhoods with the lowest charge rates, and the blue areas are the third with the highest charge rate. (White places are the middle third). The blue and red areas contain roughly the same population, but the red area is twice as big - because the red areas with low charge rates are more rural and suburban.

As you can see, the neighbourhood data is quite “noisy” because numbers are small for an individual neighbourhood3. We can get rid of that noise by aggregating the data into police force areas. If we aggregate up to the level of the police force we really lose the urban-rural picture, because most forces are big enough to contain a mix of city, town and country. But by aggregating up we can see even more clearly that some mainly-rural areas are doing much better than others.

Why do so many more crimes lead to a charge in Norfolk (15.9%) compared to neighbouring Cambridgeshire (10.2%)? Why is Dorset (12.6%) doing better than next-door Devon and Cornwall (7.4%), and why are cops in Kent (12.7%) doing better than over the border in Sussex? (7.8%).

Another dimension of variation between forces is in the use of cautions and drug warnings. The variation in approach between different forces is massive. For every ten people Cleveland police charge they give out just one caution. For every ten people Dyfed-Powys Police charge they give out nearly nine cautions. So if we look at the combined charge and caution rates the picture is a bit different - though still with the same unexplained gaps between similar force areas:

Robert Peel was right that “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them” - but it is not obvious that the forces that are doing less well at charging criminals are doing better at deterring crime.

The rural urban clear-up gap

Were the urban rural gaps we saw at the neighbourhood level just the result of more rural police forces doing things differently?

No. To look properly at the urban-rural clear-up gap, let’s drop back to the level of the neighbourhood. But rather than just eyeballing the noisy map at the top of this piece let’s do some statistical analysis.

The urban-rural clear-up gap is really big: in the most urban half of areas outside London over 11% of crimes lead to a charge or caution, but in more rural areas the share of crimes leading to a charge drops off a cliff - it’s just 6.9% in the most rural tenth of neighbourhoods.

So on this data nearly two thirds (64.5%) more crimes lead to a charge in the densest tenth than the most rural tenth.

It’s well known that there are more crimes in urban areas, but that doesn’t explain why a greater proportion should be solved.

You might wonder if this is just because the daytime population is different to where people live. We can also use a different measure of population density which ONS publish which measures workday population density4 - how many people live in an area plus how many people work there too. This gives us a different shaped curve but the same trend: far more crimes lead to a charge in urban areas.

If crimes in rural and suburban areas are much less likely to lead to a charge, what is happening with those crimes instead?

For simplicity, let’s just compare the most and least dense 10% by place of residence.

The gap is not in the use of cautions, which are used equally.

The gap is comprised of several things. In the rural areas more cases are likely to end with no suspect identified. But they are also more likely to have a suspect but not enough evidence to prosecute. And also more are handed over to another organisation: like a local authority, educational organisation, or a specialist body like border force, RSCA, DVLA etc5.

But this still doesn’t really tell us much. It is not obvious why it should be harder to prosecute a known suspect in a rural area, or even why it should be harder to identify one. On the one hand there is more public CCTV and the like in urban areas. On the other there is more anonymity in the city: the unfamiliar face or vehicle stands out more in the village than the city centre.

Crime type by area

Let’s try another approach to explaining the rural-urban gap in charge rates. Perhaps the mix of different types of crime can help to explain it?

To look at that we need to turn to another large dataset, this one focussed on crime types. This dataset isn’t designed to be updated over long periods in the same way as the data above, but is more like a snapshot each month - so it is slightly less good in that respect.6

This dataset has 11.2 million crimes and 2.2 million recorded instances of antisocial behaviour in it since the start of 2024. I have excluded the small proportion7 of crimes that are still under investigation.

You can see that some types of crime are much more likely to end up with a criminal in court: weapons offences are much more likely to lead to a charge than robbery. You can also see that there is a big variation in the use of cautions: very few burglars get a caution, but a lot of drug offenders do8.

In general, offences where the offender can often be identified at the point where the crime is detected (weapons offences, shoplifting and drugs) have higher clear-up rates than ones that rely on reports (like bicycle theft, vehicle offences and so on).

So this initially looks like a very promising explanation. Perhaps the gap is just compositional - perhaps urban areas just have more of the crimes with higher solve rates?

But no - even once we break down by crime type we still see the same rural-urban charging gap for pretty much every crime type.

The charts below all exclude London and are ordered from top left to bottom right, from the offence types accounting for the smallest number of crimes to those accounting for the most.

The rural-urban clear-up gap is visible in pretty much all crime types, particularly the larger crime types at the bottom.

On the charts above I have allowed the scales to vary on each graph - otherwise the trends would be invisible for the crime types with lower charge rates overall. But this obscures the fact that the rural-urban gap is much bigger for some crime types than others.

Let’s compare the most and least dense areas for simplicity - in other words the dots at the ends of the lines in the chart above.9

Every crime type is less likely to lead to a charge in more rural areas10. But for some the gap is bigger.

For example, for burglaries, just 3.6% are solved in the least dense tenth. More than twice as many are solved the most dense tenth (8.7%).

Constituencies

All of this talk about “the most dense 10%” and so on may sound a bit abstract. So let’s look at what it means in some real places.

Because for individual crime types the numbers are smaller, we will need to aggregate up a bit more to get meaningful numbers for local clear-up rates by offence.

Different types of crime are mainly pretty correlated, and urban areas have the most crime. The constituency with the largest number of crimes outside London is Birmingham Ladywood - represented by none other than the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

There are some quirks and variations. You won’t be surprised to learn that Oxford and Cambridge stand out for high rates of bicycle theft. Leafy Sheffield Hallam doesn’t have high crime overall, but does have a lot of burglaries. Crawley has a lot of weapons offences - nearly seven times the national average. And Liverpool seats have a lot of drugs, particularly Liverpool Riverside which recorded just under 10,000 dugs offences - that’s over 15 times the national average.

Here is the proportion of burglaries that lead to a burglar being sent to court or charged by constituency. You can see the cities stand out as darker dots, meaning much higher shares of burglars being charged.

The differences are really big, even within force areas and between neighbouring seats. In urban Leicester South 15% get cleared up. In suburban South Leicestershire it’s just 4%. In Cambridge 14% get cleared up. But in Mid Cambridgeshire just 4%. In Ipswich 13%, but in South Suffolk just 3%. In Carlisle 19%, but in neighbouring Hexham just 3%. And so on and on.

And the same is true if we look at all crimes - the charge rate is higher for Northampton than Northamptonshire, for Lincoln than Lincolnshire, for Oxford than Oxfordshire, Telford than Shropshire, and so on.

I don’t have space here to cycle through all the crime types - doing so would show that forces do either record or tackle some crimes differently. Norfolk prosecutes drug offences at a very high rate (30-40%) and Kent prosecutes a lot of public order offences - about twice the national average. So, again what individual police forces do absolutely matters - but that comes on top of an urban-rural clear-up gap that exists across most of the country.

Other trends

Because all this data is geolocated we can compare it to any other neighbourhood data we want. For example, using census data, we can see that charge rates are higher in areas with fewer people born in the UK, and higher in places where more people have never worked: given the urban-rural split this is not really surprising.

The exception: London

London has high crime rates and low charge rates, and is large enough to dominate the picture at the top end. So if we were to redraw the charts above to include London we get a more complicated shape - lower charge rates in rural areas, but also low charge rates in very densest areas (which London dominates because it is so much denser than anywhere else).

We can look inside London too, but I’m not sure what if any conclusions to draw from doing so. The overall number of crimes is highly concentrated in the very centre of the city. But even so, compared to the rest of the country the crime rate is high and the charge rate is low everywhere across the city.

I have used a different colour scale here to highlight the fact that that we are on a much lower scale in London. I’m not sure what if anything we can learn from the pattern of charge rates overall. and if you look by different crime types the pattern of charge rates seems to vary for every type of crime.

One thing you can say is that because charge rates are so low, for some crime types we see very few convictions. Less than 4% of crimes lead to a charge in places like Croydon South or Hampstead.

Across 14 |parliamentary seats in London11 there were 1,710 bicycle thefts - of which exactly zero led to someone being charged, at least in this dataset. In fact across the capital as a whole, 349 out of 32,907 bicycle thefts led to a charge or court appearance.

Conclusions

It is not obvious why, outside London, charge rates should be so much lower in rural and suburban areas than urban areas. It is not just a compositional effect - and not just to do with daytime populations.

The urban-rural clear-up gap seems to affect all crime types to a greater or lesser extent, but it is not an iron law either - some forces are doing better in rural areas than others. And London seems to be a proper exception - an urban area with very low charge rates.

The number of police officers per head is higher in urban areas where there is more crime - London and Merseyside have the most per head, Lincolnshire the fewest. But even then there is variation between similar places. Though there is a debate to be had about how many cops each area should have, given different crime rates, the data above makes the case that more police are particularly needed in less urban areas.

As well as overall force resource levels, other explanations might be:

• Resource allocations within forces. There are often worries in rural areas that the police leadership and police resources are too focussed on the urban areas where crime is higher. It is quite hard to get a handle on where within their area each police force is actually deploying officers, but one reason for the gap may be that relative to crime rates more officers are deployed in urban areas.

• Leadership and approach. Different police leaders have quite different approaches: some emphasise the need to investigate all crimes more strongly, some require that certain basic “checklist” things all happen. There are quite different approaches to cautioning vs charging in different places. Police leadership and policy may be driving part of the gap.

What to do about it

While there is no magic bullet explanation for the rural-urban clear-up gap, the need to solve it is clear. Some forces are doing better - so it can be done. And if rural areas could just get to the same clear-up rates urban ones already have then we would be solving an extra 5% of all crimes every year.

The Conservative Policing Plan would help increase charge rates across the board.

The per capita allocation of our proposed 10,000 extra police would particularly help less urban areas - because it would level up rural forces proportionately more and reduce those gaps in the map above.

Chris Philp’s plans to cut police bureaucracy and make sure police always do the basics in every investigation would help too.

Residents of the more suburban and rural parts of Britain certainly deserve better policing.

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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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