Seven Children

Inequality and Britain's Next Generation

Stacks Image 649

References

  • 4. DAVID – THURSDAY’S CHILD

    Open or Close
    1. Anonymous (2018) ‘I am writing to tell you about recent changes to free school meals eligibility under Universal Credit …’, template letter, Northamptonshire Council Services, 1 April, https://web.archive.org/web/20210715134523/https://www.northamptonshire.gov.uk/councilservices/children-families-education/schools-and-education/
    Documents/Universal_Credit_Letter_Schools.pdf
    2. Anonymous (2018) ‘How to access free school meals’, Northamptonshire Council Services, 1 April, https://web.archive.org/web/20180622114427/
    http://www3.northamptonshire.gov.uk/councilservices/children-families-education/schools-and-education/Pages/free-school-meals.aspx
    3. Guy Standing (2019) ‘Universal Credit—moralistic social policy that destroys lives’, Autonomy Blog, December, https://autonomy.work/portfolio/universalcredit-guy-standing/
    4. Estonia, Sweden, Finland, India and Brazil, among others. See Cecily Spelling (2023) ‘Which countries are already serving up school food for all?’ Sustain, 23 March, last accessed 12 April 2024, https://www.sustainweb.org/blogs/mar23-countries-have-universal-free-school-meals/ and Tatu Ahponen (2021) ‘Finland’s free school meals success story: In Finland, high-quality free school meals are provided to all children between six and sixteen as a public service—instead of handing over cash to rip-off profiteers, Britain should follow its lead’, Tribune Magazine, 26 March, last accessed 12 April 2024, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/03/finlands-free-school-meals-success-story
    5. This account is based on what still occurs today in a state secondary school in Oxford run by a multi-academy chain (a private non-profit organisation that pays its senior staff very highly) that subcontracts catering to another private organisation. The scandal of school food profiteers in the UK is described here: Anonymous (2021) ‘Profit should have no place in school meal provision’, We Own It, 10 February, last accessed 12 April 2024, https://weownit.org.uk/blog/profit-shouldhave-no-place-school-meal-provision
    6. ‘The 1970s saw a renewed focus on healthy eating and the introduction of official guidelines for school meals. These guidelines aimed to provide a balanced diet that included plenty of fruit, vegetables and whole grains. But in the 1980s, things went downhill. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher introduced a policy of privatisation, which led to many schools outsourcing their catering services to private companies.’ Gurpinder Singh Lalli, Gary McCulloch and Heather Ellis (2023) ‘A brief history of school meals in the UK: From free milk to Jamie Oliver’s campaign against Turkey Twizzlers’, The Conversation, 4 April, https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-school-meals-in-the-uk-from-free-milk-to-jamie-olivers-campaign-against-turkeytwizzlers-198124
    7. Adjusted for inflation, by 2022/23 prices, the sums of £118, £237, £305, £371, £476, £633 and £984 become, respectively, £128, £261, £349, £414, £529, £718 and £1,106. These are 8 per cent to 15 per cent higher than the equivalent figures for when the children were born, as inflation only affects a part of the calculation. See table ‘2.1ts Decile’ and ‘2.1ts: Quintile’ within the spreadsheet of the March 2024 Department for Work and Pensions HBAI data release, titled: income-values-andinequality-measures-hbai-1994–95–2022–23-tables.ods. The data files were available as of 21 March 2024 at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2023
    8. By 2022/23, in 2022/23 prices, the equivalent sums were £151, £277, £353, £428, £545, £734 and £1,134; and, so, they had risen in real percentage terms by 19.0 per cent, 4.2 per cent, 3.9 per cent, 3.4 per cent, 3.0 per cent, 2.2 per cent and 2.5 per cent since the seven children had been alive. The £22 extra that the poorest families with children received was in part because benefits had been raised in line with prices, and thus those families were not actually better off by 19 per cent but were holding steady. They appeared to be doing better because price rises occurred so quickly in these years that the attempt by the DWP statisticians to account for inflation was floundering. However, we can tentatively conclude from these numbers that as almost every family with children became poorer between 2018 and 2023, there was a slight reduction
    in household income inequality after housing costs. The numbers are from the source given in the endnote directly above.
    9. With a young child, they are more likely to be rising through the income distribution than falling as they age. This means that they are more likely to have had even less than that to get by on in the recent past than to have had more. There is a limit as to how much can be held in one’s head as concerns changing distributions, changing prices, changes over time within the average family, and variation about that. Often it is those children who know that their family became poorer when they were children who feel their childhood poverty most acutely.
    10. David’s mum knows that even by age 5, there are things David is already trying to forget, and that making up other things helps—such as imagined memories. She knows that the arguments over his eldest sister, about money, about what never gets done for want of money or time or energy, are all things that she and her husband have not hidden well enough from any of their four children. But she hides her feelings as best she can, for his sake.
    11. Harriet Grant, Aamna Mohdin and Chris Michael (2019) ‘More segregated
    playgrounds revealed: “We just play in the car park”’, The Guardian, 30 March, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/30/we-just-play-in-the-carpark-more-segregated-playgrounds-revealed
    12. Or £668 a week, much higher than the amount calculated when the costs of looking after a family of six are deducted. When their actual income is equivalised for a family with four young children, that actual total of £668 is transformed by dividing it by 1.8, as each child has a weight of 0.2 and the parents have a combined weight of 1.0. £668 divided by 1.8 is £371, which was the equivalized after-housing-costs disposable income of the median UK family with children in the financial year 2019/20 (see Appendix). Thinking of that as their income may help you most to compare their income to yours if you live with one other adult and have no children. In that case, if your income after taxes and paying for housing costs is greater than £371 a week, you are better off than them. If it is twice as much, £742 a week, then you are twice as well off each week as that family is. So, if you and the person you live with have a combined income of around £38,500 a year in 2019/20 prices, and you have no children, you have twice as much money as the family of the average median children in Britain today. If your combined income after those costs is £96,500 (£48,250 each), then you are five times better off than the family of the median child in the UK growing up today.
    13. The equivalised before-housing-costs disposable income of the median UK family with children in the financial year 2019/20 was £444, or £444-£371=£73 more a week than the after-housing-costs disposable income. Multiply £73 by 4 to get a monthly housing costs total, and by 1.8 so that the sum is no longer equivalised, and the average monthly rent or mortgage and other more minor housing costs of the median family with four young children is assumed to be £526 a month.
    14. See Danny Dorling (2016) A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier, London: London Publishing Partnership. An open access copy is available, and the book includes an analysis of how holidays, as compared to other events, have made people happy in the UK in recent decades: https://www.dannydorling.org/books/betterpolitics/
    15. Tim Morris, Danny Dorling, Neil Davies and George Davey Smith (2021) ‘Associations between school enjoyment at age 6 and later educational achievement: Evidence from a UK cohort study’, npj Science of Learning, 15 June, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-021-00092-w.epdf
    16. You might think that Xbox and PlayStation consoles have become more ubiquitous and newer consoles are released with declining frequency;  that perhaps it has become easier to afford this particular hobby? However, it is not actually viable to play on an older console for very long, because the manufacturers will withdraw support, and developers will stop developing games that run on those consoles—just as Microsoft and Apple withdraw support from older laptops and smartphones,  and block older devices from updating to the latest version of software. Games console designers are the same, and game developers do not protect compatibility with older consoles for very long, if at all, because of the lead times in the industry. Everyone knows that the next generation of Xbox is coming for so many years that it’s possible to switch to designing games that will only run on the new model years before the product launches. Buying a new-generation console is inevitable eventually. A family does have more time to save up between consoles than they did two decades ago, and yes, prices have come down
    a little in real terms, but they are not that much more affordable. If you are interested in what most people in the UK think most other people should be able to afford, see Matt Padley and Juliet Stone (2023) ‘A minimum income standard for the United Kingdom in 2023’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, https://www.jrf.org.uk/a-minimum-incomestandard-for-the-united-kingdom-in-2023—which in turn references how the minimum income is calculated: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/crsp/minimum-income-standard/household-budgets/—In 2020, for a family with four children, this included ‘luxuries’ such as the ability to afford £60 per year for babysitting, based on two nights out a year, three hours each time, to pay a local teenager to babysit for the evening. In terms of gaming, £150 for a big Christmas present, noting that: ‘Anything costing more than this would need contributionsfrom other family members.’ See p. 69 of the 77 detailed pages of https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/media/research/crsp/downloads/2020-budget-for-couple-with-four-children-aged-0–4.pdf (as of 12 April 2024).
    17. Danny Dorling, Jan Rigby, Ben Wheeler, Dimitris Ballas, Bethan Thomas, Eldin Fahmy, David Gordon and Ruth Lupton (2007) Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain 1968 to 2005, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, https://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id0463.pdf
    18. BBC (2021) ‘Free school meals: Poorer pupils miss out in funding change, say unions’, BBC News, 17 June, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57497297
    19. Robert Frank (2016) Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    20. Forty million people had a seaside holiday in Britain every year by the early 1970s, the peak era of holidays, when there was still near full employment and incomes were more equal than they had ever been before and would ever be again. The basic statistics are collected by the British Tourist Authority and made available through their Digest of Tourist Statistics. At this time, a holiday was defined as a stay of four or more nights away from home. See ‘Holidays—the hard facts’, last accessed on 12 April 2024, https://www.seasidehistory.co.uk/seaside_statistics.html
    21. Roshan Doug (2019) ‘Why teachers shouldn’t ask students about their holiday’, Times Educational Supplement, 26 August, last accessed 12 April 2024, https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/why-teachersshouldnt-ask-students-about-their-holiday
    22. The count of empty bedrooms can be found by looking at the 2011 and 2021 censuses (2011 is more accurate, but 2021 is still not bad as a source, although not as reliable). These counts can be compared to the number of spare bedrooms per person in every census going back to 1911, and when this is done, they are found to be far higher now. This is mostly due to so many older people, who often no longer have their children living with them (or who never had children), now having so many spare bedrooms in their homes. But even London has enough residential bedrooms for no one to have to share a bedroom. For the historic series of data on bedrooms per person since 1911, see Danny Dorling (2014) All that is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines our Times, and What We Can Do About It, London: Allen Lane, figure 13, p. 196. As for how all children in Britain could have a single summer holiday if the very best-off had slightly fewer holidays each year and spent less on one of them, that is a far easier sum to compute, and you could do this easily yourself, but should you require inspiration, see Catherine Bennett (2024) ‘Skiing holidays, school fees, second homes … the rich are truly deserving of our pity’, The Guardian, 7 April, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/07/skiing-holidays-school-fees-second-homes-the-rich-are-truly-deserving-of-our-pity
    23. See table 4.2db (AHC): Quintile distribution of income for children by various family and household characteristics, United Kingdom, in the detailed tables of the 21 March 2024 HBAI data release.
    24. The way you speak may, for example, verge on Received Pronunciation, possibly to offset prejudices that people might have of you if you did not speak like that today. This particular topic makes us self-conscious. You might think of how you talk as cultured but unplaceable. You might have concerns about accidentally dropping your H’s or using other downmarket signifiers, or that how you sound implies you could be lumped in linguistically with the seriously posh people in upper management who always sound so incredibly out of touch. See BBC (2020) ‘Queen’s speech “less posh”’, BBC News, 20 December, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1080228.stm
    25. Robert Walker (2014), The Shame of Poverty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Mary O’Hara (2020) The Shame Game: Overturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, Bristol: Policy Press.
    26. Not unless someone else with more secure finances agreed to act as their ‘mortgage guarantor’. See Rozi Jones (2023) ‘Over a quarter of complex income borrowers still denied a mortgage’, Financial Reporter, 4 May, https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/over-a-quarter-of-complex-income-borrowers-still-denied-a-mortgage.html
    27. Danny Dorling (2021) ‘House prices: Should we welcome a crash?’ UK in a Changing Europe, 24 July, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/house-prices-crash/28. The most usual figure cited is 42 per cent of marriages in the UK ending in divorce; however, that figure may be higher for couples facing the stress of mortgage payments and lower among those that own outright. This is hard to ascertain because the ONS does not collect such data. See ONS (2023) ‘Divorce in the UK, 2021 and 2022’, ONS Freedom of Information Answers, 4 April, last accessed 12 April 2024, https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/divorceintheuk2021and2022
    29. ONS (2021) ‘EMP17: People in employment on zero hours contracts’, Office for National Statistics, 17 August, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/emp17peopleinemploymentonzerohourscontracts
    30. Higher than rising from 5.7 per cent in 2013 to 10.8 per cent in 2020. Earlier statistics are less reliable, but see Yanitsa Petkova (2018) ‘Contracts that do not guarantee a minimum number of hours: April 2018’, Office for National Statistics, 23 April, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/contractsthatdonotguaranteeaminimumnumberofhours/april2018
    31. Alice Martin (2024) ‘New analysis reveals UK continues to fall behind rest of world as zero-hour contracts reach record numbers—and it’s young people bearing the brunt’, University of Lancaster Press Release, 21 March, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/new-analysis-reveals-ukcontinues-to-fall-behind-rest-of-world-as-zero-hour-contracts-reachrecord-numbers-and-its-young-people-bearing-the-brunt

  • 5. EMILY – FRIDAY’S CHILD

    Open or Close
    1. William Wallis and Alan Smith (2019) ‘England in 2019: Split by wealth but united by Brexit: Voters prioritise resolving the EU crisis over the deep inequality revealed in new research’, Financial Times, 29 November, https://www.ft.com/content/b398d284-11dc-11ea-a225-db2f231cfeae—Note: a standard digital subscription to the FT cost more than £300 a year in 2019; by 2024 it was over £700 a year, so think carefully before accessing.
    2. Luke Sibieta (2021) ‘The growing gap between state school and private school spending’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 8 October, https://ifs.org.
    uk/publications/15672
    3. It would not be possible for Emily to stay in the council house if her parents had a joint tenancy that continued when one of her parents died. See ‘Many tenancies can only be passed on once’, within the guidance from Shelter on ‘Succession rights in a council or housing association tenancy’, as available on 13 April 2024, https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/council_housing_association/can_you_inherit_a_council_tenancy
    4. Like the vast majority of people in the UK, they have no idea of how little school league tables tell us about how effective a school is, although the introduction of the league tables had the effect of then altering what parents thought about schools and so, in turn, altered which children went to which schools, and became, in that way, a self-fulfilling prophecy. This behaviour had become set in stone at least a decade before any of these children were born. See George Leckie and Harvey Goldstein (2009) ‘The limitations of using school league tables to inform school choice’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), 172, 4, pp. 835–51, https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-985X.2009.00597.x
    5. The farce of trying to identify some families as ‘troubled’ was made clear in a book published in the year the seven children were born: Stephen Crossley (2018) Troublemakers: The Construction of ‘Troubled Families’ as a Social Problem, Bristol: Policy Press.
    6. Helen Pearson (2016) The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives, London: Allen Lane.
    7. At the very same time, the ‘Help to Buy’ schemes inflated the cost of housing, making it harder for everyone else to buy. They put government finances at risk by the state underwriting the value of property should it fall, and these policies were by far the most expensive, and especially potentially expensive, of all those enacted by the Chancellor of the day, George Osborne. It should be asked why he did this: was it simply for later electoral gains in 2015, 2017 and 2019? See the chapter on housing in Common Sense Policy Group (2024) Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and a New Social Contract, Manchester: Manchester University Press. However, despite ‘Help to Buy’ becoming such a discredited policy, even in 2023 organisations profiting from its potential continuance were still singing its phrases: Anonymous (2023) ‘Help to Buy in numbers: Was the scheme a success? Peabody New Homes, 21 February, last accessed 14 April 2024, https://www.peabodynewhomes.co.uk/blog/helpto-buy-in-numbers-was-the-scheme-a-success
    8. ‘[I]ndustry data estimate[s] the national bus driver shortage to be 6.6% and the coach driver shortage at 13.6%.’ Guy Opperman (MP) (2024) ‘New proposals just the ticket for getting young people into transport’, Department for Transport, 11 April, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-proposals-just-the-ticket-for-getting-young-people-intotransport
    9. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper often printed what in future may be seen as patronising stories on issues such as this. For a very good example, see: ‘Being a bus driver can be hard work with the amount of traffic you have to face every day and the long hours. However, it is a rewarding job—here is what you need to know about becoming a bus driver. How much do bus drivers get paid? “Indeed” reported that as of July 2023, the average salary for a bus driver a year is £23,730.’ Adriana Elgueta, Catherine Micallef and Caroline Peacock (2023) ‘JUST THE TICKET How much do bus drivers get paid? Average UK salary explained’, The Sun, 6 July, updated 1 October, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17564412/how-much-do-bus-drivers-get-paid/
    10. James Mirza-Davies (2015) ‘Full employment: What is it and can it happen?’ House of Commons Library, 2 February, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/full-employment-what-is-it-and-can-it-happen/
    11. Oliver O’Connell (2021) ‘CEO pay has soared 1,322 per cent since 1978: Pay of typical worker increased just 18 per cent during same period’, The Independent, 10 August, https://www.independent.co.uk/money/ceo-pay-rise-increase-since-1978-b1900222.html
    12. There is one in the USA too, but it is only $7.50 an hour today, or just £6 an hour: ‘The 2007 amendments increased the minimum wage to $5.85 per hour effective July 24, 2007; $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008; and $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.’ See US Department of Labor (2024) ‘History of changes to the minimum wage law’, Official Website of the United States Government, last accessed 14 April 2024. However, note that by August 2022, some thirty states and the District of Columbia had statutory minimum wages higher than the federal minimum; so much of the USA is more similar to the UK than the worst of the USA.
    13. Something few Americans understand—just as people brought up in the USA usually have little idea of what the NHS is and why it is so beneficial to have a national health service free at the point of use; or why public school in the UK means something very different to what it means in the USA. But slowly and surely the UK has been becoming more and more like the 51st state of the United States of America, especially after the year 2020 when the UK left the EU.
    14. IMF (2021) ‘World Economic Outlook Databases’, open access data, International Monetary Fund, last accessed 15 January 2024, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2017/02/weodata/index.aspx
    15. On public spending, see Danny Dorling (2021) ‘Public spending in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, 1980–2026’, Public Sector Focus, May/June, pp. 16–19, https://www.dannydorling.org/?p=8353—and on wider issues see Danny Dorling (2017) Do We Need Economic Inequality? (The Future of Capitalism), Cambridge: Polity Press. See the online interactive charts here: https://www.dannydorling.org/books/economicinequality/
    16. This is the so-called ‘burden’ from all taxes. It is still the case in 2024, as inspection of IMF data reveals, and has been the case for some time. See Danny Dorling (2021) ‘Public sector spending and living standards in the long run’, Public Sector Focus, November/December, pp. 12–14, https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=8773
    17. This is part of a long-running trend, as inequalities in incomes and tax avoidance and evasion also increased: Ben Chu (2016) ‘The charts that shows how private school fees have exploded over the past 25 years: Over the past 25 years private school fees have risen by 550 per cent. But consumer prices in that time are up only 200 per cent’, The Independent, 11 May, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/homenews/the-charts-that-shows-how-private-school-fees-have-exploded-a7023056.html
    18. The Conservative and coalition governments that have been in power since 2010 have introduced many tax breaks, especially for the very wealthy. They continued to do this in early 2024, despite it being reported that ‘Several cities and towns have effectively gone bankrupt, the backlog of cases in courts hit a record high last August and a think tank found last year that performance in eight out of nine major public services had declined since 2010.’ David Milliken, Kylie Maclellan and Elizabeth Piper (2024) ‘UK Budget: Hunt and Sunak bet on tax cuts to revive UK election chances’, Reuters, 6 March, https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-hunt-set-help-flagging-conservatives-with-pre-election-tax-cuts-2024–03–05/
    19. Helen Miller (2019) ‘Cutting taxes on income would make UK more unusual relative to other countries’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 19 July, https://ifs.org.uk/articles/cutting-taxes-income-would-make-uk-more-unusual-relative-other-countries
    20. Our World in Data (2018) ‘Top marginal income tax rate, 1900 to 2017’, Our World in Data website, last accessed 19 April 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-income-tax-rates-piketty
    21. The last time taxes really began to be raised on the rich was in 1916, the year that Vere Harmsworth was shot in the throat and killed during the First World War. Vere was the son of Lord Rothermere, who owned The Daily Mirror and also went on to control The Daily Mail, the paper that in 2019 reported that because 43 per cent, or 23 million adults, did not pay tax, that left the other 31 million to ‘foot the bill for running the country’. Lord Rothermere’s brother, Lord Northcliffe, was so against paying inheritance tax that he left three months’ salary to each of his 6,000 employees, paid out on his death in 1922, expressly to avoid death duties. The ghosts of these men continue to haunt Britain, just as the media dynasties they founded continue to exert great power.
    22. For people on an average salary, income tax and national insurance in 2024 is 28 per cent of the income they earn above £12,570 a year (20 per cent income tax, 8 per cent national insurance). But it rises to 50 per cent of their income over £50,271 a year (40 per cent income tax, 10 per cent national insurance). In contrast, on capital gains tax for the rich: ‘If this amount is within the basic Income Tax band, you’ll pay 10% on your gains (or 18% on residential property and carried interest). You’ll pay 20% on any amount above the basic tax rate (or 24% on residential property and 28% on carried interest).’ HMRC (2024) ‘Capital Gains Tax: What you pay it on, rates and allowances’, UK Government website, 14 April, https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/rates
    23. Adam Corlett, Arun Advani and Andy Summers (2020) ‘Who gains? The importance of accounting for capital gains’, Resolution Foundation, 21 May, https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/whogains/
    24. One way is by following the advice of their financial advisers: ‘ideally, it should start before the child is born, for the sake of both ensuring your financial plan remains flexible and adaptable, and building a steady income to cover these costs’. Olivia West, as quoted in Annabelle Spranklen (2023) ‘How to send your children to private school (without breaking the bank): Ways to pay school fees in the most tax-efficient way, according to the experts’, Tatler Magazine, 31 July, https://www.tatler.com/article/how-to-afford-private-school-fees
    25. Gwyn Loader (2023) ‘Teaching assistant calls low pay disrespectful: Rebecca Ring earns £10.60 an hour as a classroom assistant, just 18p an hour more than the minimum wage’, BBC News, 30 June, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0knz011e1o
    26. Pete Henshaw (2023) ‘Teaching assistants quitting to work in supermarkets
    and restaurants’, Headteacher Update, 21 September, https://www.headteacher-update.com/content/news/teaching-assistants-quitting-to-work-in-supermarkets-and-restaurants/
    27. Owen Jones (2022) ‘From barristers to bin collectors, strikers are working to empower us all’, The Guardian, 11 October, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/11/barristers-bin-collectorsstrikers-union-wins-tories—and, just in case you are interested in the use of the term ‘bin collector’ in place of ‘bin man’, see Anonymous (2016) ‘Rejected petition: Government action to make a fairer proportion of our waste collectors women’, UK Government website, 23 November, https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/173670—Note that in 2022 women constituted 39 per cent of UK barristers and 53 per cent of solicitors: Anonymous (2023) ‘Diversity of the judiciary: Legal professions, new appointments and current postholders—2022 Statistics’, Ministry of Justice, 13 July, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-2022-statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-legal-professions-new-appointments-andcurrent-post-holders-2022-statistics
    28. To quote: ‘Glib utopianism is not what’s called for. But, equally, our thinking cannot be too hemmed-in by current realities in an era when capitalism’s maniacal addiction to growth is pitching us all into frightening new territory. I used to visit Prague a lot (it’s one of my favourite cities, with a rich history of religious and political struggle). As the former political dissident, and later Czech President, Vaclav Havel once said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” (1986: np). The Marxist critique of capitalism certainly makes a lot of sense to me, though I’m far less hopeful about the future than I used to be.’ Noel Castree (2022) ‘Marxism and the logics of dis/integration’, Human Geography, 15, 1, pp. 52–55; quoting in turn from Václav Havel (1986) The Politics of Hope, Prague: Edice Expedice.
    29. Andy Bruce (2019) ‘83 billion-pound question: UK’s Labour pitches big spending rises’, Reuters, 21 November, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-election-labour-budget-idUSKBN1XV1IE
    30. Steven Swinford (2019) ‘Election 2019: Corbyn would spend an extra £55bn a year in return to 70s’, The Times, 8 November, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/election-2019-corbyn-would-spend-an-extra-55bn-a-year-in-return-to-70s-z5lbs6xh9
    31. The costing of the 2017 and 2019 Labour party budgets revealed this: ‘This is the most comprehensive costing exercise, provided by any political party, at an election in recent times. It is published to allow informed scrutiny.’ John McDonnell (2017) ‘Funding Britain’s future’, The Labour Party, last accessed 14 April 2024, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Funding-Britains-Future.pdf[this has been removed but can be fou

    nd here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240612132934/https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Funding-Britains-Future.pdf—Both the 2017 and 2019 Labour party manifestos aimed to increase UK public spending to German levels by

    the end of a five-year transition period. In the event the Labour party manifesto, which was published in June 2024 ahead of the July general election, did not make a similar promise; but it is not impossible that a Labour government will have to do this even if they do not admit to it. On what that might achieve, if stability follows, see Muhammad Ali Nasir (2021) ‘Merkel’s caution has made Germany the great economic underachiever of our times’, The Conversation, 23 September, https://theconversation.com/merkels-caution-has-made-germany-the-great-economic-underachiever-of-ourtimes-168503
    32. John-Paul Ford Rojas (2019) ‘Are Labour’s £83bn spending plans really “impossible”?’ Sky News, 26 November, https://news.sky.com/story/are-labours-83bn-spending-plans-really-impossible-11866668

  • APPENDIX: WHERE OUR SEVEN CHILDREN CAME FROM

    Open or Close
    1. See DWP (2024) ‘Family Resources Survey’, UK Government web pages,
    last updated 21 March 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/family-resources-survey-2
    2. A bias emerged between 2020 and 2022 because of the sample of people who were approached. Those who responded more often during the pandemic came to include ‘more owner occupiers, fewer respondents from areas of deprivation, as well as an increase in older respondents, and those belonging to white ethnic groups’, so the survey was no longer representative of the UK in those years. However, after the pandemic abated, the sample became comparable again, and so comparisons can be made between 2018/19, 2019/20, and 2022/23. For what occurred in between those years see: National Statistics (2023) ‘Technicalreport: An assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the HBAI statistics for FYE 2022’, Department for Work and Pensions, 24 August, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2022-2023
    3. Note, of all prisoners in the UK, 29 per cent suffered neglect or abuse as children, 49 per cent of those aged under 21 grew up in care, and 41 per cent witnessed violence in childhood. Sophie Ellis (2024) Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile: February 2024, Prison Reform Trust, February, last accessed 4 March 2024, https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/bromley-briefings-prison-factfile-february-2024/
    4. Sarah Kincaid, Manon Roberts and Eddie Kane (2019) ‘Children of prisoners: Fixing a broken system’, Crest Advisory, February, last accessed 10 April 2024, https://www.nicco.org.uk/directory-of-resources/children-of-prisoners-a-report-from-crest-advisory
    5. See https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=70 where there is a link to more information about this book that you can click on, if you scroll down to it, and within that there is much more statistical material.
    6. This was the proportion in 2022/23; see the HBAI tables for that year titled: income-distribution-hbai-sources-chart 2–5, and within that, table 2.2 (AHC): Sources of household income by quintile and household type.
    7. Back then the second best-off quintile received 2 per cent of its annual income from its investments and the other three just 1 per cent, on average. By 2022/23, two of the other four quintiles had seen their incomes from investment fall slightly, or not rise. Wealth was becoming a slightly less important driver of the social divisions between these children, despite better-off families having saved more during the pandemic. Those people’s savings appeared to be being depleted and most families with children in the UK had almost no savings to deplete at all.
    8. Neil Cummins (2019) ‘The missing English middle class: Evidence from 60 million death and probate records’, VoxEU, 24 February, https://voxeu.org/article/missing-english-middle-class-evidence-60-million-death-and-probate-records
    9. This is for England and Wales in 2021, when a narrow majority of births were registered outside of marriage and civil partnership. These patterns do not vary much for the other parts of the UK, and the average age at birth is slowly rising over time, so was a little lower in 2018. You may also be interested to know that ‘In England, there were more live births to mothers resident in the 10% most deprived areas of the country in 2021 (12.8%, a decrease from 13.3% in 2020). In comparison, 7.7% of all live births were to mothers resident in the 10% least deprived areas of the country, a slight increase from 7.2% in 2020.’ Kanak Ghosh and Faiza Mohammad (2023) ‘Birth characteristics in England and Wales: 2021’, Office for National Statistics, 19 January, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthcharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2021
    10. ‘Head of family’ or ‘Household reference person’ was, by DWP algorithm, the adult with the highest personal income from all sources. ‘Ifthere are two or more householders who have the same income, theHRP is the eldest householder.’ Simon Clay, David Evans, Ian Herring, Julie Sullivan and Rupesh Vekaria (2012) ‘Family Resources Survey: United Kingdom, 2010/11’, Department for Work and Pensions, June,p. 184, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/222839/frs_2010_11_report.pdf
    11. Note that unfortunately there is an error in the first eight entries in the final row of the After Housing Costs (AHC) table labelled ‘All working age adults (millions)’, but we can replace those eight incorrect numbers with the correct eight from the same cells in the Before Housing Costs (BHC) table immediately before (table 5.2). If you believed the numbers, you would think there were 32 million working-age adults in households with children—an extraordinarily high number—and 7.5 million working-age adults whose household both contained children and was headed by a person over 55, which is unlikely for obvious reasons. A random series of placeholder numbers had ended up being published, rather than being copied over from table 5.2 as they should have been. You can see this if you look back to the 2005/06 data and at the number of households with children headed by someone of working age. There were 32 million adults in such households, in the data column that reads: ‘0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, 6.5, and 7.5’. Eight numbers, each exactly one higher than the number before, an arithmetic series that sums to 32. These numbers were not real data, but probably had been placed there temporarily when the spreadsheet was being created. But this error meant I wouldn’t be able to work out what had changed, especially what had changed for young people over time. I considered giving up, but then I thought, if this error had never been corrected in fifteen years, perhaps hardly anyone had ever closely studied this table before. So, what should you  do when you find that the totals, these totals, those given in the first part of the 2005/06: table 5.2 (AHC [After Housing Costs]): Quintile distribution of income for working-age adults by various family and household characteristics, United Kingdom are all wrong? The totals had to be the same as in table 5.2 (BHC), the Before Housing Costs version. Those eight numbers given in the BHC table summed to 12.7 million and looked a great deal more plausible: 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 2.9, 2.0, 0.9 and 0.4. I checked everything else added up and it did. Without a working life spent looking into these things, it’s almost impossible to spot errors of this type in the official data, let alone work out how to interpret these numbers. You have to have a sense of what is plausible and how easily mistakes can be made in order to study statistics like these.
    12. It was the reason a two-child limit was introduced to the UK benefits system in 2015, although Scottish politicians resisted that, to the great benefit of Scotland’s children. See Ruth Patrick and Kate Andersen (2022) ‘The two-child limit and fertility decision making: When policy narratives and lived experiences collide’, Social Policy and Administration, 57, 5, pp. 580–95, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/spol.12877
    13. Not all the nastiness aimed towards younger parents at the time was deliberate. Often it was institutional, so prejudice against younger parents was hardly noticed at the time. Like institutional racism, this had become embedded in parts of society, and just as institutionalised racism was only challenged when a wider racism started to be called out, and even micro-aggregations began to be noted, so too did this intolerance. Past prejudices against younger parents are better recognised today, and we often look back on media coverage of teenage and not much older parents in the past and see it as being ‘of its time’. However, we will be doing things today that we will later recognise are just as bad in another way.
    2. A bias emerged between 2020 and 2022 because of the sample of people who were approached. Those who responded more often during the pandemic came to include ‘more owner occupiers, fewer respondents from areas of deprivation, as well as an increase in older respondents, and those belonging to white ethnic groups’, so the survey was no longer representative of the UK in those years. However, after the pandemic abated, the sample became comparable again, and so comparisons can be made between 2018/19, 2019/20, and 2022/23. For what occurred in between those years see: National Statistics (2023) ‘Technicalreport: An assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the HBAI statistics for FYE 2022’, Department for Work and Pensions, 24 August, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2022/technical-report-an-assessment-of-the-impact-of-covid-19-pandemic-on-the-hbai-statistics-for-fye-2022
    14. Most people aged 16 to 24 in 2005 were still living with their parents, who were much older, so the bulk of the youngest adults of all are included in these statistics in the lines labelled in the table by the ages of much older adults, their parents. Others will be groups of university students living in private rented accommodation, with incomes that make them appear poor, even though some (if not all) of them have access to wealth from parents. So, although people are often most interested in adults of these ages, there is not much more that we can say about most of them from these HBAI sources.
    15. Danny Dorling (2013) ‘Crises and turning points: The turning points of history’, Renewal, 21, 4, pp. 11–20, https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=4006
    16. See endnote below and table A2.1: Comparison of modified OECD and McClements equivalence scales, on p. 279 in ‘Household incomes as an indicator of individuals’ living standards’, Appendix 2: Methodology, in DWP (2017) Households Below Average Income, last accessed 15 April 2024, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c8a5740f0b62aff6c2639/appendix_2_hbai12.pdf
    17. DWP (2017) Households Below Average Income (HBAI) Quality and Methodology Information Report 2015/16, Department for Work and Pensions, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/599163/households-below-average-income-quality-metholodogy-2015–2016.pdf
    18. Age; gender reassignment; being married or in a civil partnership; being pregnant or on maternity leave; disability; race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin; religion or belief; sex; and sexual orientation. This is the list for England from the 2010 Equality Act, https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights
    19. Kimberly McIntosh, Jason Todd and Nandini Da (2019) ‘Teaching migration, belonging, and empire in secondary schools’, Runnymede Trust, July, https://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/teachingmigration-belonging-and-empire-in-secondary-schools
    20. That proportion is a little higher because it concerns just England and just state schools, but also possibly because children and their parents were a little readier to say that a child identified with a minority group when they were a bit older; especially if it were not immediately obvious.
    21. According to the 21 March 2024 HBAI data release, for the situation in 2022/23: table 4.1db (AHC): Quintile distribution of income for children by various family and household characteristics, United Kingdom.
    22. Nathan Katnoria (2021) ‘What beans are baked beans? And other things you never knew about beans’, Yours website, 26 May, https://www.yours.co.uk/life/home/baked-beans/
    23. The Children’s Commissioner (2020) ‘Children without internet access during lockdown’, The Children’s Commissioner Blog, 18 August, last accessed 15 April 2024, https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/children-without-internet-access-during-lockdown/
    24. David Wilcock (2024) ‘Cherie Blair tells Sir Keir Starmer to increase benefits if Labour wins the election as she joins anti-poverty campaign demanding two-child limit and other caps are scrapped’, Daily Mail, 15 April, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13309483/Cherie-Blair-tells-Sir-Keir-Starmer-increase-benefits-Labour-wins-election-joins-anti-poverty-campaign-demanding-two-child-limit-caps-scrapped.html .
    25. Danny Dorling (2011) Roads, Casualties and Public Health: The Open Sewers of the 21st Century, Publication of PACTS’ 21st Westminster Lecture, ISSN 1740–0368, London: Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=1916
    26. BBC (2018) ‘Road accidents biggest killer of young people—WHO’, BBC News, 7 December, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-46486231
    27. 20’s Plenty for Us (2019) ‘20mph is key to Vision Zero: No fatal or serious injuries’, 20’s Plenty for Us, 18 November, last accessed 15 January 2024, https://www.20splenty.org/vision_zero
    28. Labour Party (2019) It’s Time for Real Change: The Labour Party Manifesto 2019, November, p. 21, https://web.archive.org/web/20240211205310/https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf
    29. The Welsh government initiated the changeover from 30mph to 20mph, which took place on 17 September 2023. Today, anyone in Wales driving in an area where there are street lights is driving in an area where the speed limit is 20mph, unless there is signage stating a different speed. Note that the possibility was raised in 2024 of a few roads in Wales reverting to 30mph, but a case will have to be made for that to occur in each individual instance, and very few people ever campaign to have the road they live on made less safe. See Welsh Government (2023) ‘Introducing default 20mph speed limits’, Wales Government web pages, last updated 17 September 2023, https://www.gov.wales/introducing-default-20mph-speed-limits
    30. If a sign of life is spotted, the mother of the child who dies receives higher welfare benefits. The infant death rate was also rising, and that was mainly due to an increase in the deaths of babies born very prematurely at under twenty-four weeks of gestation, which the report explained was ‘difficult to interpret but is likely impacted by multiple factors such as more consistent recognition of signs of life by clinical teams’.
    31. NCMD (2023) ‘Child death review data release: Year ending 31 March 2023’, National Child Mortality Database, release of 9 November, https://www.ncmd.info/publications/child-death-data-2023/
    32. Tomos Robinson, Heather Brown, Paul Norman, Lorna Fraser, Ben Barr and Clare Bambra (2019) ‘The impact of New Labour’s English health inequalities strategy on geographical inequalities in infant mortality: A time-trend analysis’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 73, 6, pp. 564–68, https://jech.bmj.com/content/73/6/564
    33. Danny Dorling (2006) ‘Infant mortality and social progress in Britain, 1905–2005’, chapter 11 in Eilidh Garrett, Chris Galley, Nicola Shelton and Robert Woods (eds.), Infant Mortality: A Continuing Social Problem: A Volume to Mark the Centenary of the 1906 Publication of ‘Infant Mortality: A Social Problem’ by George Newman, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 223–28, https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=2442
    34. UK infant mortality had been 6 for every 100 live births in the 1930s, fell to 3 by 1950, 1 by 1983, 0.5 by 2006, 0.36 by 2014, up by a tenth to 0.39 by 2017, and then back to 0.36 by 2020: https://www.ons.gov.uk/—It rose again for England and Wales to 3.7 in 2021. The 2022 figure is due to be published in 2024. However, see the National Child Mortality Database, release of 9 November 2023 op. cit., which suggested that rate then jumped to 3.8 per 1,000 by 2023, and that the overall child death rate in England rose from 29.3 in 2022 to 31.8 per 100,000 children in 2023: https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/news-events/news/rcpch-responds-latest-national-child-mortality-database-figures and https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/infantmortalityinenglandandwales2020to2023
    35. ONS (2017) ‘UK drops in European child mortality rankings: The UK has dropped several ranks in the European Union rankings of child mortality since 1990, recent analysis of WHO and ONS data has found’, Office for National Statistics, 13 October, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/childhealth/articles/ukdropsineuropeanchildmortalityrankings/2017–10–13
    36. See table 6 of the data tables published as part of NCMD (2023) ‘Child death review data release’ op. cit., https://www.ncmd.info/publications/child-death-data-2023/—with data tables last accessed 15 April 2024 from here: https://www.ncmd.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Reference-Tables-CDR-data-year-ending-31-March–2023.xlsx
    37. Anonymous (2019) ‘We can’t explicitly link 130,000 preventable deaths to austerity’, Full Fact, 14 June, https://fullfact.org/health/130000-preventable-deaths-austerity [Site not working as of 4 Sept 2024]
    38. Josh Gabbatiss (2019) ‘Austerity measures may have undermined cuts in child mortality rates achieved under Labour, study suggests’, The Independent, 20 March, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/child-mortality-deaths-austerity-labour-deaths-nhs-a8830686.html
    39. Quoted in Ella Pickover (2021) ‘Sajid Javid “should not put inequalities on the back burner”’, Evening Standard, 28 June, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nhs-health-secretary-bma-government-westminster-b943035.html
    40. Jonathan Barron (2024) ‘Budget 2024: What you need to know’, NHS Confederation, 6 March, https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/budget-2024
    41. ‘Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act 1977’, Wikipedia, last accessed 15 April 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_and_Shipbuilding_Industries_Act_1977
    42. For Peter Lilley’s ‘Little List’ see ‘Peter Lilley’, Wikipedia, last accessed 15 April 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lilley#Conference_song
    43. OECD (2024) ‘Income inequality (indicator)’, last accessed 7 May 2024, https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm
    44. Ibid.
    45. Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling (2023) ‘Is inequality inevitable? The “Northern European Model” suggests not’, Political Insight, 14, 1, pp. 20–21, https://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=10027

Stacks Image 1549
Stacks Image 1546
Stacks Image 1543
Stacks Image 1551