Stat of the Nation

Britain’s Baby Bust — Housing, Immigration and the Vicious Circle

Jamie Jenkins — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:02:12 GMT

Britain is having fewer babies.

New figures from the Office for National Statistics show there were 585,396 births in England and Wales in 2025 — down 1.6% in a year and the lowest number since 1977. The fertility rate has fallen to just 1.39 children per woman, while in Wales it is even lower at 1.33.

People are also having children later. The average age of mothers is now 31.1, while fathers average 34.0.

But the birth-rate story is not just about changing attitudes towards parenthood. It is also about whether younger adults can afford to leave home, establish independent households and start families.

And that brings housing and immigration into the same story.

The Vicious Circle

The argument is fairly simple.

Britain does not build enough homes.
Population growth adds more housing demand.
Housing becomes harder and more expensive to secure.
More young adults remain with parents or spend heavily on rent.
Family formation is delayed and birth rates fall.
Britain ages and needs more working-age people.
Immigration becomes part of the answer.
More people then need more homes.

And the cycle begins again.

Not every link can be given a precise causal percentage, but the wider pattern is worth examining.

More Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents

Go back to 1996 and around 21% of 20-to-34-year-olds were living with their parents.

By 2025, that had risen to 28.7% — from roughly one in five young adults to nearly three in ten. Among men aged 20 to 34, the figure is even higher at 34.9%.

There are several reasons behind that change. People spend longer in education, relationships tend to happen later and some younger adults deliberately remain at home to save money.

But look at what has happened to housing affordability over almost exactly the same period.

Homes Have Become Far Less Affordable

In 1997, the average home in England and Wales cost around 3.6 times a full-time worker’s annual earnings.

By 2025, the median house-price-to-earnings ratio was 7.6 times earnings in England and 6.0 times earnings in Wales.

So across roughly one generation, buying a home has gone from costing around three to four years of earnings to six, seven or more.

Over that same period, the proportion of young adults living with their parents has risen substantially.

That does not mean house prices explain every young adult still living at home. But it does mean the economics of establishing your own household have become much tougher than they were for the generation before.

And for people unable to buy, the alternative is often expensive private renting. The choice for many younger adults increasingly becomes staying with parents for longer or spending a large share of their income on rent.

Neither makes starting a family easier.

Housing Appears to Matter for Births

There is evidence that these financial pressures affect decisions about having children.

The Resolution Foundation, an independent economic think tank, looked at the changing fertility patterns of younger generations earlier this year. Among childless 32-year-olds, 30% of women and 25% of men said financial reasons were stopping them from trying for children.

Its analysis also found an association between the increase in young adults living with their parents and rising childlessness among some groups of younger women.

That does not mean everybody living with Mum and Dad would otherwise be having children. But the broader point is difficult to dismiss: if people struggle to afford an independent household, establishing a family becomes harder too.

Britain Has Increased Its Population Without Building Enough Homes

Housing is ultimately a question of supply and demand.

For decades Britain has struggled to build enough homes, particularly in the places where people most want or need to live. At the same time, the population has continued to grow, with international migration making an increasingly important contribution to that growth.

That matters because additional population means additional demand for somewhere to live.

More people need more homes. If the population grows faster than the housing stock, demand increases faster than supply. That puts upward pressure on house prices and rents.

The issue is therefore not simply immigration on its own. It is what happens when sustained population growth is combined with a housing system that fails to expand quickly enough.

If Britain wants a larger population, whether through natural growth or migration, it needs to build the homes and infrastructure to accommodate it.

Otherwise housing becomes scarcer, more expensive and harder for younger adults to secure.

Then the Demographic Problem Comes Back Around

This is where the circle becomes particularly important.

Britain’s low birth rate means the population is ageing. ONS projections suggest that between 2024 and 2034 there will be around 6.4 million births but 6.85 million deaths — around 450,000 more deaths than births.

Deaths are projected to exceed births from around 2026 onwards. Without migration, Britain’s population would therefore begin to shrink.

At the same time, the pension-age population is increasing. That means fewer working-age people relative to those requiring pensions, healthcare and social care.

Governments then face an obvious response: bring in more working-age people.

There is an economic logic to that. But if population continues to increase without the housing supply increasing alongside it, pressure on homes increases again.

And that brings us back to the beginning of the cycle.

Migration Is Changing Britain’s Births Too

Migration also affects Britain’s demographics through the children born after people settle here.

In 2025, 34.6% of babies born in England and Wales had a mother born outside the UK, while 40.2% had at least one parent born outside the UK.

India remained the most common country of birth for both mothers and fathers, followed by Pakistan and Nigeria.

Historically, non-UK-born women have also had higher fertility than UK-born women, although the latest robust ONS comparison is from 2021.

The broader point is simple: migration changes Britain’s population not just through people arriving, but through the families they go on to have here.

Over time, that also changes the demographic makeup of the country.

Britain Is Chasing Its Tail

This is the contradiction politicians rarely join together.

We are told Britain needs immigration because the domestic birth rate is too low. There is truth in that: fewer births and an ageing population mean fewer workers supporting a growing retired population.

But population growth also increases housing demand. If Britain continues increasing its population without increasing housing supply sufficiently, prices and rents come under more pressure.

That makes it harder for younger adults to leave home, establish independent households and, for some, start families.

Birth rates then remain low, strengthening the argument that Britain needs more working-age migrants.

And the cycle continues.

The answer is not simply more immigration or zero immigration. Britain needs to tackle the underlying problems together: build more homes, make it easier for younger adults to establish independent households, and make having children financially achievable for people who actually want them.

And if governments decide Britain needs substantial immigration, housing and infrastructure need to expand alongside the population.

Because a fertility rate of 1.39 is not just a statistic about babies. It is a warning about Britain’s future workforce, housing market, public finances and population.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Welsh Labour Ran Education for 27 Years — Wales Has Fallen Further Behind England

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:01:19 GMT

Education has been devolved in Wales since 1999.

That gave Wales the freedom to make different choices from England — on assessment, qualifications, accountability and ultimately the curriculum itself.

But there is another important fact when judging what followed.

From the creation of devolution in 1999 until May this year, every Welsh Government was Labour-led.

Different coalition and governing arrangements came and went, but Labour remained the constant at the centre of government until the change of administration in May 2026.

So when we ask what 27 years of devolved education has delivered, we also have to ask what 27 years of Labour-led government has delivered.

And the numbers are difficult to defend.

The Gap With England Has Widened Sharply

We cannot compare PISA all the way back to the start of devolution because Wales first participated separately in 2006.

PISA is the OECD’s international assessment of 15-year-olds, testing how well pupils can apply their knowledge in maths, reading and science.

What has happened since Wales first took part separately is striking.

In 2006, Wales was already behind England — but the gaps were relatively small.

England was:

11 points ahead in maths
15 points ahead in reading
11 points ahead in science

By 2025, those gaps had become:

36 points in maths
38 points in reading
40 points in science

That is the key statistic in this story.

The two education systems have not moved closer together.

They have moved much further apart.

That does not prove that devolution itself caused poorer educational outcomes. There are plenty of other factors at play — deprivation, attendance, demographics, funding and the disruption caused by Covid.

But devolution gave Wales responsibility for education policy.

And for almost all of that period, that responsibility sat with a Labour-led Welsh Government.

Responsibility has to mean accountability for the results as well as credit for the successes.

Wales Is Bottom of the UK

The latest PISA results make the current position even clearer.

Around 3,400 pupils from 113 Welsh schools took part in the 2025 assessment.

And Wales recorded the lowest average score of the four UK nations in all three subjects.

In maths, Wales scored 456, compared with 492 in England.

In reading, Wales scored 459, compared with 497 in England.

And in science, Wales scored 476, compared with 516 in England.

It wasn’t simply England outperforming Wales either.

Wales finished behind England, Scotland and Northern Ireland in maths, reading and science.

The longer-term Welsh trend is not encouraging either.

Compared with 2018:

Mathematics has fallen from 487 to 456
Reading has fallen from 483 to 459
Science has fallen from 488 to 476

But for me, the bigger story is not simply that Welsh scores have fallen.

It is that after decades of controlling its own education system, Wales has fallen considerably further behind England.

Labour Had the Time — And the Power

This is where political accountability matters.

Welsh Labour did not briefly inherit the education system before these results.

It led the government of Wales for nearly 27 years.

There were periods of coalition and cooperation with other parties. Between 2016 and 2021, for example, Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams served as Education Minister within a Labour-led administration.

But that does not change the wider picture.

From 1999 until May 2026, Welsh Labour was the continuous governing force.

If a party wants the credit for the choices made under devolution, it also has to accept scrutiny when the outcomes are poor.

And education was one of the biggest areas where Wales chose to diverge.

Wales Chose a Different Path

Welsh governments changed large parts of the education system.

SATs at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 were ended. Wales moved away from publishing school-level performance used for league tables, introduced the Foundation Phase, created the Welsh Baccalaureate, developed a separate qualifications system and, most recently, introduced the Curriculum for Wales.

That is exactly what devolution was supposed to allow.

Wales was free to try something different.

But eventually different has to be judged against better.

And after more than a quarter of a century, where is the evidence that the different approach delivered better educational outcomes?

Reform After Reform — But Where Are the Results?

Poor educational performance in Wales is not a new discovery.

After the 2009 PISA results, then-Education Minister Leighton Andrews described them as a “wake-up call” and evidence of “systemic failure.”

That was followed by further reform — a renewed focus on literacy and numeracy, changes to accountability and a new regional school-improvement system.

The OECD was brought in to advise Wales.

Further reforms followed, including another major overhaul of the curriculum.

So this is not a story about governments doing nothing.

Wales has had repeated strategies, repeated reforms and repeated attempts to raise standards.

The question is whether they worked.

And on this internationally comparable measure, the gap with England is wider now than when the Welsh PISA series began.

What About Covid?

Covid clearly matters.

Educational attainment fell across much of the developed world after the pandemic, and Wales was no exception.

There had also been some encouraging progress before it. Wales improved across all three PISA subjects between 2015 and 2018 before falling sharply in 2022.

But Covid cannot explain the whole story.

By 2018, before the pandemic, England was already:

17 points ahead in maths
22 points ahead in reading
19 points ahead in science

Those gaps have since widened further.

England experienced Covid too. So did Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The pandemic is part of the explanation.

It does not explain why the long-term gap between Wales and England has become so much wider.

The New Government Cannot Be Blamed for These Results

There is one political distinction that matters.

The current Welsh Government only took office after the May 2026 Senedd election.

The PISA assessments were taken in 2025.

So these results plainly cannot be blamed on a government that had not yet taken office.

Nor are they a definitive judgement on the new Curriculum for Wales. The pupils tested had not been educated throughout under that curriculum, so future PISA rounds will provide a better test of whether the latest reforms improve performance.

PISA is not perfect either.

No single measure tells you everything about an education system.

But it is particularly useful here because England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland increasingly operate different education systems.

PISA gives us a common international benchmark.

And on that benchmark, Wales now records the lowest scores in the UK in maths, reading and science.

More importantly, these results give us something else:

a final international benchmark of the education system inherited after nearly 27 years of Labour-led government.

And that record deserves serious scrutiny.

So What Did 27 Years Deliver?

Devolution allowed Wales to build its own education system.

Labour had almost 27 years leading the Welsh Government in which to shape that system.

It had the time.

It had the power.

And it repeatedly argued that doing things differently would deliver better outcomes for Wales.

So look at the results.

When Wales first appears separately in the comparable PISA series in 2006, it was 11 to 15 points behind England across maths, reading and science.

Today it is 36 to 40 points behind.

That is not proof that every policy pursued by Welsh Labour caused those results.

But after nearly three decades in charge, political accountability cannot simply be passed somewhere else.

Welsh Labour led the government. Welsh Labour oversaw the system. And this is the education record it left behind.

Devolution gave Wales the freedom to do things differently.

After 27 years, the gap with England is considerably wider than it was.

So the question is no longer simply whether Wales did things differently.

It is why, after nearly three decades of Labour-led government, different did not deliver better.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Burnham Is Still Blaming Brexit — But Britain’s Problems Run Much Deeper

Jamie Jenkins — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 07:02:22 GMT

Andy Burnham is back in Westminster — and Brexit is once again part of the explanation being offered for Britain’s weak economic performance. In my latest discussion with Mike Graham on the , we looked at Burnham’s argument, what the growth data actually shows, and some of the deeper problems holding Britain back.

Burnham Is Still Blaming Brexit

Burnham argues that Brexit has contributed to a decade of poor economic growth.

But treating Brexit as a defining explanation for Britain’s weak performance misses a much bigger picture.

Since the referendum, the UK economy has grown more than Germany and Italy and broadly in line with France. Spain has done considerably better.

What Is Really Holding Britain Back?

Britain should be doing much better.

The question is not whether we have beaten Germany over the past decade. It is why an economy with Britain’s strengths has struggled to generate stronger, sustained growth.

One issue I raised with Mike was energy.

Cheap, reliable energy matters enormously for economic growth. It affects manufacturing, hospitality, retail, transport, data centres and ultimately the prices households pay.

If British businesses face higher costs than their international competitors, it becomes harder to invest, expand and create jobs.

Taxation, productivity, regulation and business investment all matter too.

Blaming Brexit is easy. Building a genuinely competitive economy is much harder.

Britain’s Borrowing Costs

We also discussed what has been happening in the bond markets.

Public sector debt is approaching £3 trillion, while more than £100 billion a year is being spent servicing the debt.

Some of the recent rise in gilt yields reflects global pressures, but Britain’s borrowing costs remain particularly high.

Continually adding to the debt pile makes that increasingly expensive.

Ultimately, governments only have a few ways to improve the position: cut spending, raise taxes or generate stronger economic growth.

And continually raising taxes risks making that third objective harder.

Has Devolution Delivered?

Mike and I also discussed Burnham’s calls for greater devolution.

The principle sounds attractive: decisions should be made closer to the people they affect.

But after more than 25 years of devolution in Wales, the question should be straightforward:

Has it actually produced better outcomes?

More layers of government mean more politicians, more staff and more administration.

The justification has to be better public services or genuinely better policymaking.

Healthcare should have been one of the great tests of devolution — different parts of Britain trying different approaches and learning from what works.

Instead, Wales gives us plenty of reasons to question whether devolving more power automatically means better government.

The Bigger Picture

Britain absolutely has a growth problem.

But the causes run much deeper than one referendum.

Energy costs, tax, spending, productivity, investment and the size of the state all matter.

Politicians can keep looking back to 2016.

Or they can explain what they are going to do to make Britain more competitive today.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain’s Double Squeeze — Higher Energy Bills, Then Higher Interest Rates

Jamie Jenkins — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:01:52 GMT

Britain has been here before. Global energy prices rise, inflation follows, and then the Bank of England responds by increasing interest rates.

For households, the result is simple: higher bills and higher borrowing costs. Consumers get hit twice.

And there is a danger Britain could do it all over again.

The Bank Is Talking About Higher Rates Again

Bank Rate currently stands at 3.75%, but three of the nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee voted in July to increase it to 4%.

Chief Economist Huw Pill was one of them, and this week he again argued for higher rates because of the risk that renewed energy inflation becomes embedded in wages and wider prices.

Yet the Bank itself accepts that monetary policy cannot influence energy prices. Higher rates cannot produce more oil or gas, end conflict in the Middle East or directly reduce the international price Britain pays for energy.

What they can do is increase mortgage payments, make business borrowing more expensive and reduce household spending.

Higher rates work by weakening demand across the economy.

But when the original inflation comes from an external energy shock, consumers are already being squeezed before the Bank acts.

We Have Already Tried This

This is essentially what happened during the last cost-of-living crisis.

Energy prices were already rising sharply during the second half of 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, as the global economy reopened after Covid and energy demand rebounded faster than supply.

The Bank said wholesale oil prices were around 80% higher than at the end of 2020, while wholesale gas prices were around 400% higher. European gas stocks had also been depleted following a cold winter.

Russia’s invasion in February 2022 then made an already serious situation considerably worse, sending energy and other commodity prices higher again.

UK inflation eventually peaked at 11.1% in October 2022. Households were paying almost 89% more for electricity, gas and other fuels than a year earlier.

At the same time, the Bank was rapidly increasing interest rates. Bank Rate went from just 0.1% in December 2021 to 5.25% by August 2023.

Millions of households therefore faced soaring energy and food bills alongside rapidly rising mortgage and borrowing costs.

Consumers were hit twice: first by the inflation shock, then by the response to it.

What Can Higher Rates Actually Fix?

There is a case for higher interest rates when inflation is being driven by excessive demand. If households and businesses are spending faster than the economy can supply goods and services, higher rates can cool that demand.

An energy shock is different.

If Britain suddenly has to pay more for imported oil and gas, the country becomes poorer. Households pay more for energy, fuel, food and the wider cost of producing and transporting goods.

Increasing interest rates does not reverse that loss. It adds another squeeze on spending.

That is why the important question is not simply “Is inflation rising?”

It is “Why is inflation rising?”

Even the Bank Accepts the Difference

The Bank’s real concern is what economists call second-round effects — higher energy costs becoming embedded in wages, business pricing and inflation expectations.

That is a legitimate risk. But the Bank’s latest assessment says there has so far been little evidence of significant second-round effects.

It also says the labour market remains loose, demand is soft and underlying inflationary pressures have continued to ease. Six of the nine Monetary Policy Committee members therefore voted to leave rates unchanged in July.

That makes another increase harder to justify. If demand is already weak and there is little evidence that the energy shock is becoming embedded, why impose another squeeze on households and businesses?

The Bank worries about acting too late. It should also worry about doing too much.

Households Pay the Price

Higher rates ultimately mean more expensive mortgages, credit cards, personal loans and business finance. Someone refinancing a fixed-rate mortgage can suddenly find themselves paying hundreds of pounds more each month.

Businesses face higher financing costs too, making investment and expansion less attractive.

So households can be squeezed from both directions: their everyday costs rise because energy is more expensive, while their borrowing costs rise as well.

That does not make Britain richer. It leaves families and businesses with less money to spend and invest.

And Banks Can Benefit

There was another striking feature of the previous period of rapidly rising interest rates.

While households saw borrowing costs increase, major banks enjoyed stronger interest income. Parliament’s Treasury Committee noted significant increases in the net interest margins of Britain’s biggest banks — the difference between the interest they receive and the interest they pay.

Commercial banks also hold large reserves at the Bank of England on which the Bank pays interest.

In 2023, NatWest, Barclays, Lloyds and Santander received more than £9 billion in interest on Bank of England reserves — a 135% increase in a single year.

That £9 billion was not simply profit; banks have funding costs and pay interest to depositors. But the contrast is still uncomfortable.

Mortgage holders were facing sharply higher borrowing costs while billions of pounds in additional interest flowed through the banking system as Bank Rate rose.

Don’t Repeat the Double Squeeze

The Bank of England has a responsibility to stop temporary inflation becoming embedded. But that does not mean every increase in inflation requires higher interest rates.

Britain cannot solve a global energy shock by making mortgages and business borrowing more expensive. When energy prices rise, households are already poorer because they are paying more for the same essentials.

The Bank should require compelling evidence that the shock is feeding into persistent domestic inflation before squeezing the economy again.

We saw what happened last time. Energy bills surged while Bank Rate climbed from 0.1% to 5.25%.

Consumers paid from both directions.

Higher energy costs. Higher borrowing costs.

The double squeeze — all over again.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Midwives Without Jobs. £500bn in Foreign Aid. And the Data Government Won’t Releasee.

Jamie Jenkins — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:03:14 GMT

This week’s conversation with Mike Graham on the kept coming back to one word: priorities.

Governments tell us money is tight, public services are stretched and taxes are already high. But when you look at some of the choices being made, the numbers raise some fairly obvious questions.

63 Qualified Midwives — But No Jobs

Let’s start in Wales, where around 63 newly qualified midwives remain without NHS jobs, despite completing the education and clinical training needed to work in maternity services.

Earlier this year, 68 graduates were reportedly left without posts through the NHS Wales recruitment process. Two months later, only five had secured jobs. These are people who have trained for a frontline NHS profession in a health service that regularly talks about workforce pressures, yet there are no funded jobs for them.

At the same time, the Welsh Government has funded a £350,000 Wales and Africa programme, which included its long-running tree-planting work in Mbale, Uganda. Wales also maintains a network of overseas offices, including locations in China.

The question is not whether every pound spent overseas is automatically wasted. It is about priorities.

If Wales can afford to train midwives, surely employing those midwives to deliver babies should be somewhere near the top of the spending list.

Britain Has Spent Almost £500bn on Foreign Aid

That brought us onto an even bigger spending question: how much has Britain actually spent on foreign aid since 1960?

I went back through OECD data and added up the annual figures. In cash terms, the total comes to around £285 billion. But a pound spent in 1960 was worth considerably more than a pound today, so I also adjusted the historic spending for inflation.

My calculation using the OECD data puts the total at around £500 billion in today’s money.

Half a trillion pounds.

Now put that alongside Britain’s public finances. UK public sector net debt is approaching £3 trillion, while the Government continues to borrow tens of billions of pounds because spending exceeds the money coming in. Britain has not recorded an annual budget surplus for more than two decades.

That does not mean foreign aid caused one-sixth of Britain’s national debt. Government finances do not work like that. But £500 billion is equivalent in scale to roughly one-sixth of today’s entire net debt, which puts the sums involved into perspective.

It also leads to a simple question about how we set the foreign aid budget. Rather than choosing an arbitrary percentage of national income to spend overseas, why not link it to what Britain can actually afford?

My preference would be simple: run a surplus first, then decide how much of that surplus Britain wants to spend overseas.

If government is borrowing money every year just to fund its existing commitments, taxpayers are entitled to ask whether sending billions of pounds abroad should remain a priority.

Why Is Government Fighting to Keep Crime Data Secret?

The third issue should concern people regardless of where they stand on immigration.

The Government holds information about criminal convictions. A Freedom of Information request sought conviction data for England and Wales broken down by nationality and offence, but the Ministry of Justice refused to release it.

The Information Commissioner subsequently ruled that the information should be disclosed. The Government is now appealing that decision.

So we have a fairly extraordinary position: the data exists, there is substantial public interest in seeing it, the Information Commissioner says it should be released, and the Government is fighting that decision. Taxpayers are ultimately paying for that fight.

Having spent years working in government statistics, this is where I have a real problem.

Official statistics exist to inform public debate. If government holds information that can shed light on an issue of significant public interest, then — unless there is a compelling legal, privacy or ethical reason to withhold it — transparency should be the default.

The data isn’t the Government’s. It’s the public’s.

Importantly, none of us should prejudge what the complete dataset will show. Perhaps it will reveal substantial differences between nationalities. Perhaps it will show that some of the claims circulating online are exaggerated.

That is precisely why it needs to be published.

Release the figures, provide proper population comparisons where robust data exist, break the numbers down by age and sex where appropriate, and explain the limitations. Then let people debate the evidence.

Keeping information hidden simply fuels suspicion.

40,000 Heat Deaths. 139,000 Cold Deaths.

Finally, we discussed new Office for National Statistics analysis of temperature-related mortality.

There has understandably been enormous discussion about heatwaves and the health risks associated with rising temperatures. Those risks are real, but the historical comparison is striking.

Between 1988 and 2025, the ONS estimates that in England there were approximately 40,000 deaths associated with the hottest temperatures compared with 139,000 associated with the coldest temperatures.

That means mortality associated with the coldest temperatures was more than three times higher over the period.

There is an important caveat. These are statistical estimates based on the relationship between temperatures and mortality; they are not simply counts of death certificates listing “heat” or “cold” as the cause. Heat-related mortality has also been increasing in recent years.

But the historical numbers still matter. When we debate climate and energy policy, keeping people warm and able to afford their heating remains an important public-health issue too.

Get the Priorities Right

These are four very different stories, but the same question runs through each of them: are government priorities matching the problems the country actually faces?

If we spend public money training frontline NHS workers, we should be able to employ them. If Britain is approaching £3 trillion of debt, major areas of spending deserve scrutiny. If government holds statistics that could inform one of the biggest political debates in the country, transparency should be the starting point. And when we discuss climate risks, we should look at the complete evidence.

Politicians can announce targets, strategies and spending plans. The numbers tell us whether the priorities actually make sense.

That is what Stat of the Nation is here to do.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain Has Spent £500bn on Foreign Aid — But Hasn’t Balanced the Books Since 2001

Jamie Jenkins — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:00:31 GMT

Britain has spent almost half a trillion pounds on foreign aid since 1960, measured in today’s money.

I went back through more than six decades of OECD data to work out exactly how much.

Adding up the money recorded at the time gives a total of around £285 billion. But simply adding pounds spent in 1960 to pounds spent today obviously understates the earlier spending, because money was worth considerably more then.

So I adjusted each year’s expenditure into 2025 prices using the ONS GDP deflator.

That gives a total of around £496 billion — almost half a trillion pounds.

But the most interesting part isn’t the total.

It is when the money was spent.

The Spending Surge After 2000

For roughly four decades, Britain’s inflation-adjusted foreign aid spending was remarkably stable.

In today’s prices:

1960s: ~£40bn
1970s: ~£43bn
1980s: ~£40bn
1990s: ~£41bn

Then something changed.

2000s: ~£82bn
2010s: ~£162bn
2020–2025: ~£89bn already

Britain spent around £41bn in today’s money during the whole of the 1990s. That roughly doubled to £82bn in the 2000s, before doubling again to £162bn in the 2010s.

That is not an inflation story. These numbers are already adjusted for changing prices.

In cash terms, annual aid spending went from around £3bn in 2000 to more than £8bn by 2010 and over £15bn by 2019.

So why did it rise so sharply?

A large part of the answer is the political drive towards the 0.7% aid target.

Where Did the 0.7% Target Come From?

The 0.7% figure wasn’t designed around Britain’s public finances.

Its roots go back more than half a century. In 1969, a World Bank-backed commission chaired by former Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson recommended that wealthy countries devote 0.7% of their national income to official development assistance.

The United Nations adopted the target the following year. Britain eventually reached 0.7% in 2013, and the commitment was put into UK law in 2015.

But the underlying principle remained the same: measure aid against the size of the economy rather than whether the Government itself is running a surplus or deficit.

And the world in which that target was created looked very different.

When the UN adopted the target in 1970, Britain was paying roughly £1.3bn a year in government debt interest. Today the annual bill is around £100bn-plus, with recent forecasts putting it at roughly £110bn.

Britain now carries close to £3 trillion of public debt, continues to run substantial deficits and spends around £100bn a year servicing that debt.

Yet the basic aid formula still asks the same question it did more than 50 years ago:

How large is national income?

It does not ask how much Government raises, how much it already spends, how much it needs to borrow or how much is being consumed by debt interest.

That is worth questioning.

Where Does the Money Go?

It is also important to be clear about what “foreign aid” actually means.

In 2025, total UK Official Development Assistance was around £13bn.

That included bilateral programmes, funding for international organisations, humanitarian aid and around £2.4bn spent supporting refugees and asylum seekers inside the UK.

So it is wrong to assume that every pound described as foreign aid is simply transferred overseas.

The latest complete country-level figures, for 2024, showed Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia among the largest individual recipients. But one of the biggest spending categories was actually “Refugees in Donor Countries”, reflecting eligible expenditure inside Britain.

There are legitimate reasons for overseas spending. Humanitarian aid following wars, famines and natural disasters can save lives. Disease prevention abroad can protect Britain, while development programmes can improve stability and strengthen diplomatic relationships.

This isn’t an argument for Britain turning its back on the world.

It is about what Britain can afford.

Britain Keeps Spending More Than It Raises

Gross National Income tells us about the size of Britain’s economy.

It does not tell us whether Government itself has any money left over.

And Britain usually doesn’t.

The ONS general-government net lending and borrowing series shows the last calendar year in which Government revenue exceeded expenditure was 2001.

Every year since 2002 has recorded a deficit.

Government continues to borrow because the taxes it raises are insufficient to cover everything it chooses to spend. Debt is close to £3 trillion, while around £100bn a year is now being absorbed by debt interest.

Yet historically the aid target has had little connection to that fiscal position.

If national income increased, a fixed percentage of GNI implied a larger aid budget — regardless of whether Government expenditure exceeded revenue by £20bn, £50bn or £100bn.

That seems an odd way to measure affordability.

For context, our inflation-adjusted £496bn historical aid total is equivalent to roughly one-sixth of Britain’s current national debt.

That does not mean foreign aid caused one-sixth of the debt. It is simply a comparison to show the scale of the money involved.

Could Burnham Push Spending Back Up?

Aid spending has already started falling.

UK ODA was approximately:

£15.3bn in 2023
£14.1bn in 2024
£13.0bn in 2025

The current policy is to reduce aid towards 0.3% of GNI by 2027, with savings helping to fund higher defence spending.

But Andy Burnham is already under pressure from Labour MPs to put Britain back on a path towards the previous 0.7% target.

Burnham has not committed to restoring 0.7%, and that distinction matters.

But if the debate does return, the amounts involved are significant.

Using roughly 2025 levels of national income:

0.3% of GNI: around £9bn
0.7% of GNI: around £21bn

That is a difference of approximately £12 billion a year.

Any move back towards 0.7% would therefore have to compete with demands for more money for the NHS, social care, defence, housing and infrastructure — while Government is already borrowing and debt remains close to £3 trillion.

Affordability should surely be part of that conversation.

Are We Using the Wrong Measure?

Imagine two governments.

Both have economies of the same size.

One raises £1 trillion and spends £950bn, leaving a surplus.

The other raises £1 trillion and spends £1.1 trillion, forcing it to borrow £100bn.

A foreign aid target determined solely by GNI could require broadly the same level of aid spending from both, despite their financial positions being completely different.

That gets to the heart of the problem.

When Government already spends more than it raises, every additional permanent commitment ultimately means some combination of more borrowing, higher taxes or less spending elsewhere.

That applies to the NHS, welfare, defence — and foreign aid.

Britain should retain the ability to provide emergency humanitarian assistance, and some overseas programmes clearly advance British strategic interests.

But beyond that, long-term development spending should surely reflect Britain’s fiscal capacity rather than automatically being determined by national income.

That does not necessarily mean linking aid mechanically to whatever surplus happens to appear in one particular year. A more stable rule could look at the underlying fiscal position over several years.

The exact formula can be debated.

The principle is simpler:

Affordability should matter.

The Question We Should Be Asking

Britain has spent around £285bn in recorded cash ODA since 1960.

In today’s money, my calculation puts that at around £496bn.

For decades, inflation-adjusted aid spending was broadly stable. Then it doubled in the 2000s and doubled again in the 2010s.

Meanwhile Britain has not recorded a general-government surplus since 2001. Today we have almost £3 trillion of debt and spend around £100bn a year simply servicing it.

None of that means Britain should stop helping people overseas.

Foreign aid can save lives and some of it can directly advance Britain’s interests.

But it still has to be paid for.

For decades, the argument has been about whether Britain should spend 0.3%, 0.5% or 0.7% of national income.

Perhaps we have been arguing about the wrong percentage.

The real question is whether we have been measuring foreign aid against the wrong number all along.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

150,000 Appeals. A 67-Week Wait. And Britain Still Can’t Remove People

Jamie Jenkins — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:15:36 GMT

This week, I joined Mike Graham on the to discuss some of the biggest stories behind the headlines, and what the latest numbers tell us about the state of Britain.

From more than 150,000 immigration and asylum appeals waiting to be heard to Britain losing another 94,000 payrolled jobs, the same problem kept appearing:

The Government is spending more money managing the consequences of failure instead of preventing the problems in the first place.

Watch the Full Discussion

Watch my latest Stat of the Nation conversation with Mike Graham below:

150,000 Appeals Waiting to Be Heard

The standout figure this week was 150,000.

That is how many immigration and asylum appeals are currently waiting to be heard.

The average wait for a decision is now 67 weeks.

Remember: that wait begins after an initial immigration or asylum decision has already been made.

The Government has introduced a new target requiring certain new appeals to be heard within 24 weeks. That would be an improvement, but it does not clear the enormous backlog already sitting in the system.

Rejecting an application is one thing.

Resolving the appeal, locating the individual and removing somebody with no legal right to remain is something else entirely.

Britain does not just have an illegal-arrivals problem. It has a removals problem.

Jobs Down. Benefits Up.

We also discussed the weakening labour market.

Britain had 94,000 fewer payrolled employees in July than a year earlier, and approximately 183,000 fewer than around the time of the general election.

Vacancies have fallen to levels last seen in 2014, excluding the pandemic.

At the same time, Universal Credit has reached a record 8.4 million claimants.

There are important caveats. Much of the longer-term increase in Universal Credit reflects existing claimants being transferred from older benefits.

But that transfer is now close to completion, while the underlying caseload continues to rise.

Businesses have also told the Office for National Statistics that higher labour costs and other operating expenses are among the reasons they are recruiting less.

Make employment more expensive and businesses employ fewer people.

Who could possibly have predicted that?

Why Britain’s Energy Costs Matter

Mike and I also discussed the cost of living and why falling inflation does not mean prices are falling.

When inflation drops, prices normally continue increasing, just more slowly than before.

And energy remains central to the problem.

Almost everything produced or sold in Britain requires energy somewhere along the way.

Factories need it.

Shops and restaurants need it.

Transport and distribution depend upon it.

Even your local cafe needs energy to make a cup of tea.

Britain cannot expect to become more competitive while maintaining some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world.

Yet we continue importing gas from countries such as Norway while restricting production from our own side of the North Sea.

If we want to reduce the pressure on household bills and British businesses, bringing energy costs down must be a national priority.

Managing Failure After It Happens

These stories may appear separate, but they share a common theme.

Britain taxes employers and then wonders why recruitment falls.

It allows immigration and asylum cases to accumulate and then announces another target to clear them.

It restricts domestic energy production and then complains about high prices and weak economic growth.

Too much government policy is focused on managing failure after it happens.

The country needs to start preventing these problems in the first place.

🎥 Watch the full discussion with Mike Graham above, we cover all of this and plenty more.

What do you think is Britain’s biggest problem: bad policies, poor delivery, or a political system that never accepts responsibility when either goes wrong?

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain Is £15 Billion Away From £3 Trillion of Debt

Jamie Jenkins — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:01:56 GMT

Britain is getting remarkably close to another fiscal milestone. Not a good one.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics put public sector net debt at £2.985 trillion at the end of July.

That leaves Britain only around £15 billion away from £3 trillion of debt.

Over the past twelve months alone, the debt total has increased by £95.9 billion.

There is nothing economically magical about crossing £3 trillion, but it is an extraordinary marker of just how accustomed Britain has become to living with enormous levels of government debt.

Britain Is Still Borrowing

There is some better news in the figures, and it is important to acknowledge it.

The public sector borrowed £56.7 billion between April and July, which was £6.0 billion less than during the same four months last year.

So borrowing is moving in the right direction compared with 2025.

But there is another comparison that matters: the Government is still borrowing more than had been expected. The April-to-July total was £2.3 billion above the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast.

In July alone, public sector borrowing was £1.8 billion. That was £700 million more than in July last year and £2.3 billion above the OBR’s forecast for the month.

So this is not a story of public finances suddenly spiralling in every direction.

It is arguably more concerning than that: even with some improvement in borrowing, Britain is still adding to a debt mountain already approaching £3 trillion.

Taxes Are Rising — But Spending Rose Faster

The most revealing comparison in the latest figures is what happened to government revenue and spending over the past year.

Compared with July 2025, central government tax receipts increased by £4.0 billion to £81.4 billion.

Income-related taxes brought in £38.6 billion, VAT raised £18.5 billion and Corporation Tax contributed £8.9 billion. Overall current central government receipts reached £104.3 billion, around £4.6 billion more than a year earlier.

The Treasury is not suffering from a collapse in revenues.

But spending increased by even more.

Total central government expenditure reached £110.7 billion in July — £5.7 billion higher than a year earlier. Across the wider public sector, Britain still ended the month with another £1.8 billion of net borrowing.

That gives us a pretty simple snapshot of the challenge facing Britain’s public finances:

More tax. More spending. More debt.

Why More Tax Isn’t Enough

One month’s figures cannot tell us everything about the long-term direction of the public finances, but the pressures underneath the July numbers are revealing.

Central government spending on social benefits reached £29.5 billion, £2.0 billion more than a year earlier.

Spending on goods and services reached £39.8 billion, up £1.2 billion, while debt interest rose to £7.7 billion, around £700 million higher than in July 2025.

Overall central government expenditure increased by around 5.4%, while current government receipts increased by around 4.6%.

Yet when Britain’s public finances come under pressure, much of the political debate immediately turns to where government can raise more revenue.

Increase a tax. Freeze a threshold. Raise an employer levy. Find another source of money.

There is a limit to how far that approach can take us.

In July, central government collected £4 billion more in tax than a year earlier, yet its total expenditure increased by £5.7 billion.

Britain cannot keep relying on higher taxation to repair the public finances while spending continues to expand.

At some point, spending has to be part of the conversation too.

That does not mean indiscriminately cutting everything. It means asking much harder questions about what government does, how efficiently public services operate, what taxpayers should reasonably be expected to fund and which commitments the country can genuinely afford.

Those questions become harder the longer they are postponed.

The Debt Interest Trap

One figure deserves particular attention: £7.7 billion of central government debt interest in July alone.

That is money spent servicing borrowing accumulated by governments over many years.

It does not build a hospital, employ another police officer or improve a road.

It pays for yesterday’s borrowing.

And the bigger the debt mountain becomes, the more exposed the public finances are to movements in inflation and borrowing costs.

Britain is particularly exposed through index-linked government debt, where some interest costs move with the Retail Prices Index.

In July, the RPI-linked capital uplift alone added around £1.3 billion to government interest costs.

This is one reason why debt matters even if the Government can comfortably continue selling gilts today. Borrowing creates commitments that future taxpayers have to service, and those commitments compete with everything else government wants to spend money on.

£3 Trillion Is Coming

There is obviously nothing economically magical about the number £3 trillion.

Britain does not suddenly go bankrupt when the debt counter moves from £2.999 trillion to £3.000 trillion.

But psychologically, it should matter.

Three trillion pounds is an extraordinary amount of accumulated debt.

And we should remember how we got here.

Governments of different colours have contributed to Britain’s fiscal position. COVID massively accelerated borrowing, as the state stepped in to support businesses, workers and public services during an unprecedented shutdown.

But the deeper problem predates the pandemic.

Britain has become accustomed to spending more than it raises over long periods.

Those annual deficits accumulate. Eventually they become trillions of pounds of debt, and the interest bill becomes another permanent call on taxpayers.

The latest £95.9 billion increase over just twelve months should be viewed in that wider context.

Cut Spending — Not Just Raise Taxes

There are ultimately only a handful of ways to improve Britain’s public finances.

Raise more tax. Reduce spending. Grow the economy faster. Or combine all three.

Britain desperately needs stronger economic growth. A larger, more productive economy generates more revenue without continually increasing tax rates.

But growth cannot be used as an excuse to avoid making choices about spending.

There also has to be much greater discipline over what government spends, alongside serious work to improve public-sector productivity and get better value from the enormous sums taxpayers already provide.

We cannot simply reach for another tax rise every time the numbers refuse to balance.

Workers and businesses already face an enormous tax burden. Continually asking them for more while allowing expenditure to expand is not a sustainable fiscal strategy.

For years, much of Britain’s political argument has centred on how government can raise more money.

We now need a much more uncomfortable conversation about how much government should spend.

Britain is around £15 billion away from £3 trillion of national debt.

If that isn’t the moment to get serious about public spending, what is?

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Jobs Down. Benefits Up. Britain Has a Work Problem

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:01:48 GMT

Two sets of official statistics released this week paint a worrying picture.

On one side, Britain is still losing payrolled jobs.

On the other, the number of people on Universal Credit has reached another record.

There are important caveats behind both sets of figures. But put them together and there is a warning Britain shouldn’t ignore.

We need more businesses creating jobs and more people able to move into work. Right now, the numbers are moving in the opposite direction.

Britain Is Still Losing Jobs

Latest HMRC payroll figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there were 30.3 million payrolled employees in July 2026.

That’s 94,000 fewer than a year ago.

Employee numbers were also down another 13,000 on June, although that latest monthly estimate is provisional and may be revised.

The bigger picture is clear enough: payroll employment peaked during 2024 and has subsequently fallen.

And some parts of the economy are being hit much harder than others.

Wholesale and retail employment has fallen by 75,000 in just one year, the largest fall of any major sector.

Hospitality is struggling too. Payrolled employment in accommodation and food services was 2.8% lower than a year earlier, the largest percentage fall among the major sectors.

These are sectors employing millions of people and providing many of the entry-level jobs that help people get into the labour market.

They are also operating against a backdrop of higher employment and operating costs.

And the ONS itself says:

“Feedback from our Vacancy Survey suggests that some firms may not be recruiting because of increases in labour costs and other operating expenses.”

That matters.

Businesses don’t create jobs simply because politicians want them to. If employing someone becomes more expensive while margins are being squeezed elsewhere, firms have an obvious incentive to recruit less, cut hours or reduce headcount.

The jobs machine isn’t firing as it should.

Meanwhile, Universal Credit Hits 8.4 Million

Alongside the latest labour-market figures, the Department for Work and Pensions published its latest Universal Credit statistics.

There are now:

8.4 MILLION people on Universal Credit.

That’s the highest number since the benefit was introduced.

It’s up from 7.7 million a year ago and dramatically higher than the 5.5 million recorded in early 2022.

But this needs some important context.

Simply looking at that increase and concluding that millions more people have suddenly become dependent on benefits would be wrong.

Much of the Rise Has Been People Moving From Old Benefits

Universal Credit has been replacing a range of older benefits.

That process, known as Move to Universal Credit, or managed migration, has transferred large numbers of existing benefit recipients onto UC.

And it explains most of the spectacular increase we’ve seen over the past couple of years.

Between December 2023 and December 2025, the Universal Credit caseload increased by around 2 million people.

Around 1.6 million, roughly 78% of that increase, were people moved onto Universal Credit through managed migration.

That’s an important distinction.

They weren’t 1.6 million completely new people entering the welfare system. Many were already receiving support through Employment and Support Allowance, tax credits, Housing Benefit and other legacy benefits.

But this is where the latest figures get more interesting.

The managed-migration programme is now largely complete.

And since the beginning of this year, the underlying picture has started to change.

Between January and May:

the total UC caseload increased by around 37,000
managed-migration claimants actually fell by around 16,000
other UC claimants increased by around 52,000

In other words, the latest increase is no longer being driven by managed migration.

That’s what we need to watch now.

4.3 Million Have No Work Requirements

Perhaps the most striking number in the latest release is this:

4.3 MILLION Universal Credit claimants are now in the “no work requirements” group.

That’s more than half of everybody on Universal Credit.

By comparison, only around 1.6 million are in the “searching for work” group.

Again, context matters.

“No work requirements” does not mean millions of people simply choosing not to work.

It includes people whom the system does not currently require to look for or prepare for work, including many people with serious health conditions or disabilities and people with caring responsibilities.

And managed migration from health-related legacy benefits explains much of the historic increase.

But once again, look at what’s happening now.

Between January and May 2026, the no-work-requirements group increased by 87,000.

Only 10,000 of that increase came from managed migration.

The remaining 77,000, around 88% of the increase, came from other Universal Credit claimants.

That’s significant.

For years, one of the obvious explanations for the rapidly expanding no-work-requirements population was the transfer of existing ESA recipients.

That explanation is becoming much less relevant to the latest growth.

Fewer Universal Credit Claimants Are Working

Universal Credit is not simply an unemployment benefit.

Millions of people receive it while working because their earnings or household circumstances still make them eligible for support.

But the employment numbers have also weakened.

In April 2025, around 3.2 million Universal Credit claimants were in some form of employment, representing 41.9% of the caseload.

By April 2026 that had fallen to around 3.1 million — 37.7%.

Part of the fall in the percentage is explained by the changing composition of UC as people migrate from health-related benefits.

But the absolute number in employment has fallen too.

And that is happening at exactly the same time as the wider payroll figures show Britain losing employees.

How Has the Nationality Mix Changed?

There is another part of the Universal Credit data worth examining.

DWP nationality statistics show that in April 2026 there were approximately:

574,000 European Economic Area (EEA) nationals, excluding Ireland
526,000 non-EEA nationals

receiving Universal Credit.

The European Economic Area includes EU countries plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Combined, that’s around 1.1 million identifiable EEA or non-EEA nationals on Universal Credit.

A further roughly 188,000 people had no nationality recorded on DWP’s digital systems. We shouldn’t assume those people are foreign nationals, their nationality is simply unknown in this dataset.

The longer-term change among non-EEA nationals is particularly striking.

In April 2022, around 212,000 non-EEA nationals were recorded on Universal Credit.

By April 2026 that had increased to approximately 526,000.

That’s a rise of around 314,000, or 148% in four years.

For comparison, the overall Universal Credit caseload increased by around 50% over roughly the same period.

Nationality is recorded administratively and people’s circumstances can change. Eligibility for Universal Credit also depends on immigration and residency rules, being a foreign national does not automatically give somebody an entitlement to benefits.

But the scale and pace of that increase are still worth examining.

Jobs Down. Benefits Up.

None of these figures in isolation tells us everything about Britain’s economy.

There are legitimate reasons why people receive Universal Credit.

Millions of claimants work.

Much of the huge increase in UC over recent years was an administrative transfer from older benefits rather than new welfare dependency.

And many of those with no work requirements have health conditions, disabilities or caring responsibilities that genuinely prevent them from working.

Those facts matter.

But so does the direction of travel.

The latest data show that:

Britain has 94,000 fewer payrolled employees than a year ago
retail has lost 75,000 payrolled employees
hospitality employment is down 2.8%
a record 8.4 million people are on Universal Credit
4.3 million have no work requirements
the latest growth in that group is overwhelmingly not being driven by managed migration

Britain needs an economy that makes it easier for businesses to create jobs.

And we need a welfare system that supports people who genuinely cannot work, while doing everything reasonably possible to help those who can work into employment.

Jobs down and benefits up isn’t a direction Britain can afford to continue.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

230 People. One Dinghy. And Britain Still Can’t Stop the Boats.

Jamie Jenkins — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:00:48 GMT

This week, I joined Mike Graham on to discuss some of the biggest stories behind the headlines — and what the numbers tell us about the state of Britain.

From 230 people arriving in a single Channel dinghy to drought, struggling public services and falling productivity, one question kept coming back:

Are we actually getting enough in return for all the money being spent?

Watch the Full Discussion

Watch my latest Stat of the Nation conversation with Mike Graham below:

230 People. One Dinghy.

The standout number this week was 230.

That is how many people crossed the Channel in a single dinghy — more people than many passenger aircraft carry.

As I said to Mike, boarding a plane takes time even with gates, staff, allocated seats and an organised process.

So how do 230 people gather on a beach, board one vessel and launch towards Britain without being stopped?

That is one of the questions we get into in the full discussion.

More Money. Less Output?

We also discussed the latest public-sector productivity figures.

Productivity remains below where it was before the pandemic, with healthcare performing even worse.

Yet whenever public services struggle, the answer from politicians is usually the same:

Spend more money.

Before taxpayers are asked for even more, shouldn’t we first ask what we are getting from the resources already going in?

That takes us into GP access, online triage and the wider question of whether higher spending is actually delivering better services.

Drought, Water and What We Get for Our Money

Britain is once again talking about drought, despite exceptionally wet weather only months ago.

If hotter and drier summers are going to become more common, where are the reservoirs, water storage and serious plans for adaptation?

And it feeds into the wider theme of this week’s conversation.

Taxes rise.

Council tax rises.

Water bills rise.

Yet many people increasingly feel they are getting less in return.

The debate shouldn’t just be about how much government spends. It should be about what taxpayers actually get for it.

🎥 Watch the full discussion with Mike Graham above — we cover all of this and plenty more.

What do you think? Are Britain’s biggest problems really a lack of money — or are we simply failing to get enough from what we already spend?

Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain Is Spending More — But Public Services Are Still Less Productive Than Before Covid

Jamie Jenkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 06:00:48 GMT

There is a fairly simple question we should ask whenever politicians announce billions more for public services: what are we actually getting for the money?

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, in 2025, overall UK public-service productivity was still 2.5% below where it was in 2019. For healthcare, it was 5.8% lower.

There has been a recovery since Covid, and that matters. But after five consecutive years of improving productivity, Britain still has not got back to where it was before the pandemic.

That should be a much bigger part of the debate about how we fund the state.

What Does Productivity Actually Mean?

This sounds more complicated than it is. It isn’t a measure of whether individual nurses, teachers or civil servants are working hard enough.

It is essentially asking: how much public service are we getting for the resources going in?

Those resources include staff, buildings, equipment, goods and services. The outputs are things such as hospital treatments, GP appointments and education.

If output rises faster than the resources required to deliver it, productivity improves. If resources rise faster than output, productivity falls.

We spend a lot of time talking about how much government spends. We spend far less time asking what that spending actually delivers.

Why Did Productivity Collapse During Covid?

Covid was an extraordinary shock, but the fall in productivity was also partly the result of choices government made about how to respond.

Schools were closed, non-urgent NHS activity was delayed or cancelled and normal public services were heavily disrupted. At the same time, huge additional resources were poured into the public sector.

In 2020, public-service output fell 7.4%, while inputs increased 9.2%. Healthcare productivity fell 23.0% and education productivity 26.1%.

So this was not simply public-sector workers suddenly becoming less productive. Government deliberately restricted large amounts of normal activity while simultaneously increasing the resources going into the system.

The bigger question now is whether some Covid-era working practices and expectations became embedded. Hybrid working is the obvious example. That does not automatically mean lower productivity, but Covid clearly changed how parts of the public sector operate.

The fall in 2020 is relatively easy to explain. Why productivity is still below 2019 six years later is the more important question.

Five Years of Recovery — And Still Below 2019

Let’s be fair about the figures. Public-service productivity increased by 0.7% in 2024 and another 0.9% in 2025.

In 2025, public-service output increased by 1.7%, while inputs increased by 0.7%. That is exactly what we want to see: more being delivered without resources growing at the same rate.

And 2025 marked the fifth consecutive year of improving productivity following the huge disruption caused by Covid.

So this isn’t a story about productivity currently collapsing. The story is how slowly Britain is recovering what it lost.

After five years of improvement, public-service productivity was still 2.5% below its 2019 level.

Think about that. We aren’t trying to beat some ambitious new benchmark, we are still trying to get back to where we were before Covid.

The NHS Numbers Are Worse

Healthcare is particularly important because it is the biggest part of measured public-service expenditure, and again there has been improvement.

Healthcare productivity increased by 1.1% in 2024 and 1.0% in 2025. Healthcare output rose 2.2% in 2025, compared with a 1.1% increase in inputs.

That is good news. But despite those improvements, healthcare productivity remained 5.8% below its 2019 level.

Nearly six per cent, and remember the comparison. This isn’t the NHS of today being judged against some distant period decades ago. It is being compared with 2019.

That is why I get frustrated when every NHS debate immediately becomes a bidding war over who will spend the most money. Of course funding matters, but surely we also need to ask why a health service receiving enormous resources is still producing less output for those resources than it did before the pandemic.

Simply putting more money in cannot be the only answer.

The Latest Improvement Is Still Small

The ONS has also looked at the latest four quarters, covering April 2025 to March 2026.

Across public services, productivity increased by 0.5%, with output rising 1.7% and inputs increasing 1.2%. Healthcare productivity increased by just 0.4%.

Again, the direction is positive, but the improvement remains modest.

Healthcare output increased by 2.1%, while inputs increased by 1.8%. So more is being delivered, but it is also taking considerably more resource to deliver it.

That leaves only a small productivity gain.

The State Is Not Short of Resources

This is where the wider picture matters, because government spending is already enormous.

Latest Treasury figures show Departmental Expenditure Limit spending reached around £640 billion in 2025/26, up 3.8% in real terms on the previous year. Day-to-day departmental spending alone was almost £497 billion.

Around 6.19 million people were employed in the public sector in March 2026, roughly 37,000 more than a year earlier. Public-sector regular pay was also growing at 5.5%, compared with 2.9% in the private sector, although the timing of NHS pay awards influenced that comparison.

Now, these measures are different. You cannot simply point at higher spending and say it caused weak productivity, it doesn’t work like that.

But we can ask a perfectly reasonable question: if the state keeps consuming more money, employing more people and paying higher wages, when should taxpayers expect a much bigger improvement in what it delivers?

There is a limit to how much more government can tax, borrow and spend without asking whether it is getting enough back.

Stop Confusing Spending With Success

This, for me, is the bigger point.

Success in government is too often measured by how much money has been announced: another £1 billion here, another £5 billion there, more staff, a bigger NHS budget.

But spending is an input, not an achievement.

The achievement is what we get back: more patients treated, shorter waits, better education, faster decisions and public services that work.

The latest ONS figures show some progress, but overall public-service productivity is still 2.5% below 2019, while healthcare remains 5.8% below.

The Covid collapse is relatively easy to explain. The harder question is why, nearly six years later, we still haven’t fully recovered.

Government now needs to focus far more on productivity: cutting bureaucracy, using technology better, reviewing working practices and making sure additional spending actually delivers additional output.

Because there are ultimately only three ways to fund an ever-more-expensive state:

Tax more. Borrow more. Or become more productive.

Britain has spent too long relying on the first two.

Getting back to 2019 should not be considered success. Taxpayers already put an extraordinary amount into the British state — they should expect an extraordinary amount back.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

163,000 Fewer Payrolled Jobs — Burnham Must Reverse Labour’s Tax on Hiring

Jamie Jenkins — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:02:25 GMT

Britain is not simply losing jobs. It is losing the jobs that give young people their first chance to work.

A new business survey suggests private-sector firms have reduced staffing for 22 consecutive months, matching the longest sustained downturn recorded during the financial crisis.

Official figures from the Office for National Statistics point in the same direction.

Payrolled employment has fallen from around 30.45 million in June 2024 to 30.28 million in June 2026, approximately 163,000 fewer employees than in the month before Labour entered government.

Labour did not create every weakness in the jobs market. Employment growth was already slowing before the election.

But it inherited a cooling labour market and then increased the cost of employing people.

That was the wrong policy at the wrong time.

Andy Burnham now has an opportunity for a genuine economic reset. He should begin by reversing the Reeves-era policies that made it more expensive for businesses to create jobs.

The ONS Data Confirm the Warning

One business survey does not define the entire labour market.

But official figures show the same broad pattern:

Vacancies have fallen to 712,000, below their pre-pandemic level.
Unemployment is higher than it was a year ago.
Private-sector regular pay growth is just 2.9%.
Accommodation and food services lost 79,000 payrolled employees over the latest year.

This is not another 2008-style employment crash.

But private-sector hiring is weak, vacancies are shrinking and labour-intensive service businesses are shedding staff.

This is the labour-market inheritance Burnham now has to confront.

The First Rung Is Disappearing

Hospitality, retail, leisure and other service industries are often the first rung on the employment ladder.

They give young people and inexperienced workers the chance to learn how to deal with customers, work in a team, handle responsibility and build a CV.

When those jobs disappear, young people face an obvious contradiction.

Employers demand experience, but fewer employers are prepared to offer the first opportunity to gain it.

That can have lasting consequences. A difficult transition from education into employment can damage earnings, confidence and future job prospects for years.

You cannot demand that young people gain experience while taxing the jobs that provide it out of existence.

Reeves Increased the Cost of Hiring

From April 2025, employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.

The salary threshold at which employers begin paying it was also cut from £9,100 to £5,000.

Minimum wage increases, pension contributions, energy bills and other costs have added further pressure.

Higher minimum wages can improve incomes for those who remain in work. But ministers must also consider what happens to recruitment, hours and entry-level opportunities.

An employer does not employ a wage rate. They employ a person with a total cost attached.

For a large company, higher costs may encourage automation.

For a local pub, café, hotel or shop, they may mean fewer vacancies, shorter hours or fewer staff.

A higher hourly wage is no victory for the young person who receives zero hours because the job no longer exists.

Burnham’s Reset Must Be Real

Burnham should not defend every Reeves policy simply because it carries a Labour label.

A change of prime minister should mean more than changing ministers and slogans.

The Government should now do three things.

Cut Employer National Insurance for Entry-Level Jobs

Employer National Insurance should be reduced or removed for apprentices, younger workers and genuine new entry-level positions.

The principle is simple:

Government should make it cheaper, not more expensive, for a business to take a chance on somebody without experience.

Restore a Higher National Insurance Threshold

Cutting the threshold from £9,100 to £5,000 brought more lower-paid and part-time jobs into the employer-National-Insurance system.

These are precisely the roles often filled by young people, parents returning to work and people moving off benefits.

The threshold should be raised, particularly for smaller employers and lower-paid jobs.

Put Every Policy Through a Jobs Test

The Government should commit to no further increases in employment taxes during this Parliament.

Every major tax, wage or workplace policy should be tested against one basic question:

Will this make a small business more or less likely to employ one additional person?

The Private Sector Must Generate the Growth

Public services need staff.

But sustainable growth ultimately depends on private businesses creating productive jobs, profits, wages and taxable income.

If private employment and private wage growth weaken, the tax base weakens too.

That creates a destructive cycle:

Higher spending leads to higher taxes. Higher employment taxes weaken hiring. Weaker hiring reduces growth and revenues. The Treasury then demands more tax.

That is not a growth strategy.

It taxes the jobs needed to generate growth.

Stop Taxing the First Job

The labour market is not collapsing, but the warning signs are clear.

Businesses are cutting staffing, vacancies are down and entry-level opportunities are becoming harder to find.

Burnham should not spend billions repairing the consequences of unemployment while preserving the taxes that discourage employment.

The reset should be simple:

Cut the cost of hiring. Protect entry-level jobs. Give small businesses a reason to take a chance on somebody new.

Young people cannot gain experience unless somebody can afford to employ them.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📚 You might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain Failed to Build Enough Prisons — So Prisoners Are Released Early

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:02:16 GMT

Britain’s adult male prisons are operating at 98% capacity. The consequence is not simply overcrowded jails; sentencing policy is being rewritten around the number of cells available.

From October, some eligible prisoners currently released after 40% or 50% of their sentence could become eligible after one third. Someone handed a three-year standard determinate sentence could therefore have an earliest release point of around one year, with the remainder served under supervision in the community.

Rapists, serious child-sex offenders and grooming offenders have now been excluded. More than 18,000 prisoners serving the most serious sentences, including life and Extended Determinate Sentences, will also remain under the existing arrangements.

That is right, but it does not answer the bigger question: why did Britain allow its prisons to become so full that thousands of other prisoners must leave earlier at all?

This is not justice designed around the sentence. It is sentencing designed around the number of available cells.

Sentences Are Being Changed to Fit the Space

The Government says its new progression model will reward good behaviour. Prisoners who break the rules or behave violently could be held for longer, potentially for their entire sentence.

But the starting point still matters. Some prisoners currently released at 40% or 50% could become eligible after one third, while some currently released after two thirds could become eligible after one half.

The Prime Minister has admitted that he wanted to exclude more offenders but could not do so without risking the prison system “reaching capacity and collapsing”. The Government’s own announcement says more than a decade of inadequate investment has left adult male prisons at 98% capacity.

That is the central issue. Ministers are not principally arguing that every affected offender no longer needs to be in prison; they are saying there is insufficient space to keep them there for as long.

Court sentences should determine the prison capacity Britain needs. Prison capacity should not determine how much of a court sentence is served behind bars.

The Prison Estate Is Filling with Longer Sentences

There were 85,858 prisoners in England and Wales on 30 June 2026, including 70,003 sentenced prisoners. Around seven in ten people serving immediate custodial sentences had been convicted of violence, sexual offences or drug offences.

Compared with June 2025, the number serving sentences of between two and five years rose by around 10%, while those serving five to seven years increased by 7%. At the other end of the scale, the number serving less than six months fell by 22%, with those serving six to 12 months down 16%.

Some of this is straightforward arithmetic. Prisoners serving longer terms remain in the estate for years and accumulate, while people serving only a few months pass through much more quickly.

But the fall in short-sentence prisoners does not necessarily mean fewer lower-level offenders. In some cases, it means people who might previously have gone directly to prison are instead receiving suspended sentences or punishment in the community.

The Sentencing Act creates a presumption that custodial sentences of 12 months or less should be suspended, subject to exceptions including significant risk of harm, breaches of court orders and exceptional circumstances.

Britain is therefore changing the prison population from both directions: releasing some prisoners sooner while sending fewer short-sentence offenders to prison in the first place.

Ministers may argue that tougher community sentences are more effective for some offenders. But the shortage of prison space is plainly helping to determine who enters prison, as well as when others leave.

The Capacity Failure Happened Years Ago

The Government is now building more prison places, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. It says 2,900 places have been delivered since July 2024, more than 5,000 are under construction and 14,000 additional places are planned by 2031.

That investment is necessary and overdue. It does not alter the fact that sufficient capacity should have existed before prisons reached 98% occupancy and release rules had to be changed.

The Government says only 500 net places were added to the prison estate over the previous 14 years. New prisons and cells were built, but closures, maintenance and capacity lost elsewhere meant the overall increase was nowhere near enough.

This explains how thousands of new “places” can be announced while the estate remains almost full. Gross construction is not the same as the net increase in usable capacity, and rising prisoner numbers can absorb new places almost as soon as they open.

Britain has not built nothing. It failed over many years to add enough net, usable capacity to create meaningful breathing room.

The current building programme is welcome, but those cells are arriving after the shortage has already forced changes to sentencing.

One Prison Category Has Nearly Doubled

At a time when prisons are 98% full and ministers say other offenders must be released earlier, one category of the sentenced population has risen particularly sharply.

The number serving immediate custodial sentences for public-order offences was 86% higher in June 2026 than in June 2024. The Ministry of Justice says this is likely to reflect the disorder during summer 2024, but public order covers a wide range of conduct.

Some prisoners may have committed serious violence, made threats or caused criminal damage. Others may have been convicted over protest, speech or material published online, which is why the figures do not allow us to assume that every additional prisoner was a violent rioter.

Cases such as Lucy Connolly’s show why the conduct behind each sentence matters. When prison space is this scarce, it is reasonable to ask whether every public-order case resulting in custody represented the best use of a limited cell.

That leaves a legitimate question: why has the state nearly doubled the number imprisoned from this broad offence category at the same time it says prisoners elsewhere must be released early because there are not enough places?

If dangerous offenders committed violence, prison may be entirely justified. But where cases involved speech, protest or online material rather than physical harm, the use of scarce prison capacity deserves far greater scrutiny.

One arm of the justice system increased the number imprisoned from this category. Another brought forward the release of existing prisoners to make room.

The state should explain clearly why these offences have resulted in such a sharp increase in imprisonment while other offenders are being released early.

Early Release Moves the Pressure Elsewhere

Releasing prisoners does not remove the risk or workload. It transfers more responsibility to probation, electronic monitoring and recall enforcement.

There were 13,193 licence recalls between January and March 2026, an increase of 31% compared with the same quarter a year earlier. The Ministry of Justice says early-release schemes increased the number of people on licence and therefore the opportunities for recall.

Not every recall means another offence has been committed. People can be returned to prison for breaching licence conditions, including failing to remain in contact or breaking residence requirements.

But the consequences when release goes badly wrong can be devastating. Liam Matthews was released from HMP Holme House in September 2024 and later that day took part in the fatal attack on 26-year-old Lewis Bell. He was subsequently convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years, followed by three years on extended licence.

One horrific case cannot describe the behaviour of every prisoner released early. It does, however, show why releasing prisoners to create space cannot be treated as a purely administrative exercise; for Lewis Bell and his family, the consequences were permanent.

Foreign Offenders Must Be Removed Where Possible

There were 10,134 foreign nationals in custody on 30 June 2026, including 6,431 sentenced prisoners, 3,283 people held on remand and 420 non-criminal prisoners.

Those groups must not be confused. Someone held on remand has not necessarily been convicted, and not every sentenced foreign national can lawfully or practically be removed.

However, where deportation or transfer abroad is lawful, it should happen quickly. Every avoidable delay occupies a cell that could be needed elsewhere.

The Government says it wants foreign offenders removed faster and in greater numbers. That must become a practical part of relieving pressure on the estate, rather than another review that produces little action.

Build the Cells — And Be Honest About the Policy

The Government is right to accelerate prison construction, but building now does not erase the failure that allowed the estate to reach this point.

Adult male prisons are 98% full. Some prisoners could become eligible for release after one third of their sentence, fewer short custodial sentences will result in immediate imprisonment, and more punishment and risk management will move into the community.

The Government describes this as a sustainable sentencing model. In reality, it has been designed under the immediate constraint of insufficient prison capacity.

Had Britain built enough usable places over the previous decade, ministers would have had far more freedom to decide sentencing policy on its merits. Instead, the Prime Minister has admitted that excluding more offenders could cause the prison system to collapse.

Britain did not fail because no prisons were built. It failed because nowhere near enough capacity was created before the crisis arrived.

Early release creates an empty cell today, but it does not create the prison capacity Britain needs tomorrow.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📚 You might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

The Burnham Bounce, Another Social Care Review, and Britain’s Broken Border

Jamie Jenkins — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:02:41 GMT

This week, I joined Mike Graham on from the Netherlands to discuss the stories behind the headlines and what the numbers tell us about the state of Britain.

From drought after months of flooding to another review of social care, the same pattern keeps appearing. Britain does not lack political announcements. It lacks delivery.

Watch the Full Discussion

Watch my latest Stat of the Nation conversation with Mike Graham below:

This Week We Discussed

• Why Britain faces water shortages after months of flooding

• Whether the Burnham bounce is real

• Britain’s 22nd social care review in around 30 years

• The falling number of UK millionaires

• Whether Burnham could call an early general election

• Why illegal Channel crossings remain his biggest political test

The Burnham Honeymoon

Andy Burnham has improved Labour’s polling position, but that should not be surprising.

After Keir Starmer’s collapse in popularity, almost any replacement was likely to receive an immediate political honeymoon.

The more important question is where Labour’s support is coming from.

Burnham appears to be winning back people who had moved towards the Greens, Liberal Democrats or the undecided column. There is far less evidence that large numbers of Reform voters are returning to Labour.

For now, much of the media are focused on Burnham’s style, speeches and promises.

The real test will begin when Parliament returns and those promises face proper scrutiny.

Political honeymoons are enjoyable. Then the bill arrives.

Britain Reviews Problems Instead of Fixing Them

Burnham has announced another review of social care.

Britain has already held 22 reviews into the issue over roughly 30 years. Politicians understand the problem, but repeatedly avoid the difficult question of how care should be organised and funded.

A more national system may make sense. Leaving local councils to manage widely different levels of demand has created an inconsistent service.

But a National Care Service would cost billions.

People are also living longer while spending more years in poor health and needing support. There is now a gap of around 20 years between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy.

That places increasing pressure on families, councils, hospitals and care providers.

Another review can describe the crisis. It cannot pay for it.

The same failure can be seen in water infrastructure.

Britain experienced widespread flooding only months ago. Now large parts of the country are facing drought conditions.

We have not completed a major new reservoir for around 30 years, despite substantial population growth and increasing demand.

When it rains, we fail to control the water. When the rain stops, we discover that we did not store enough of it.

That is not simply a weather problem.

It is an infrastructure failure.

Is Britain Reducing Inequality by Becoming Poorer?

Mike and I also discussed estimates suggesting that the number of UK millionaires has fallen by around 7% over the past year.

After adjusting for inflation, the total is reportedly at its lowest level since the financial crisis in 2008.

The figures measure net wealth. Assets such as property and investments are included, but debts such as mortgages are deducted.

Some may welcome fewer millionaires as evidence of reduced inequality.

But Britain does not become more prosperous by losing wealth, investment and successful taxpayers.

Labour may have discovered a quick way to reduce the wealth gap: make everyone poorer.

That is not growth. It is managed decline.

The Border Test

Illegal Channel crossings may ultimately determine whether Burnham can win back voters who have moved to Reform.

People have heard repeated promises about smashing the gangs, improving cooperation with France and reforming the asylum system.

Yet when the weather improves, the boats continue to arrive.

That suggests the weather remains a more effective deterrent than government policy.

Burnham can improve Labour’s presentation. He can speak more naturally than Starmer and offer a more optimistic story about Britain.

But voters will eventually judge him on results.

Can he secure the border?

Can he establish who is entering the country?

Can he improve public services without increasing taxes again?

Can he generate economic growth rather than redistribute a shrinking pool of wealth?

Those are the tests that will determine whether the Burnham bounce becomes a lasting political recovery or another short lived Westminster honeymoon.

The Bottom Line

Andy Burnham has changed the mood around Labour.

He has not yet changed the underlying reality.

Britain still faces failing infrastructure, unresolved social care costs, declining wealth and a border that remains out of control.

The Burnham bounce will last until the promises meet the numbers.

And the numbers eventually win.

Do you think Andy Burnham can deliver real change, or is this just another political honeymoon?

Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

One of the Wettest Winters. Drought by Summer. What Went Wrong?

Jamie Jenkins — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:00:54 GMT

Britain has moved from an unusually wet winter to widespread drought in a matter of months.

Rainfall across the UK last winter was 13% above the long term average. England received 42% more rainfall than normal, while Wales received 20% more. England experienced its eighth wettest winter on record, with southern England recording its fourth wettest.

Yet half of England has now officially been declared in drought, while Natural Resources Wales has extended its environmental drought declaration across the whole of Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered by those declarations, but the situation raises a wider UK question about whether essential infrastructure has kept pace with the country’s growth.

The immediate cause of the drought is clear. July brought exceptionally low rainfall, sustained high temperatures and soaring demand. But extreme weather does not remove the responsibility to prepare for it.

The bigger question is why a country that has added millions of people, built millions of homes and repeatedly warned of growing pressure on water supplies has taken so long to expand the infrastructure needed to support them.

From a Wet Winter to Drought

By the end of February, England’s reservoirs were 94% full, with twelve completely full. River flows were normal or higher at every monitored site, while groundwater levels had risen across most of the country. The winter rainfall provided an important buffer as Britain entered spring.

Then the rain stopped.

By late July, England had received just 7% of its long term average rainfall for the month, falling to only 1% across southern England. Wales had received just 8% of its normal July rainfall, putting the month on course to be the driest July in Wales since records began 190 years ago.

This is a genuine drought with serious consequences. Rivers are exceptionally low, groundwater levels are falling, wildlife is under pressure and farmers face worsening conditions. In England, seven water companies have introduced temporary restrictions covering 23 million customers, around 40% of the population.

However, drought is not only a test of the weather. It is also a test of how much resilience a country has built into its water system.

The Population Grew. Infrastructure Did Not Keep Pace

In 1995, the UK population was just over 58 million. The provisional estimate for 2025 is almost 69.5 million.

That is an increase of approximately 11.5 million people, or nearly 20%, in 30 years.

Every additional household requires a reliable supply of clean water. Every new housing development needs pipes, treatment capacity, local storage and connections to the wider network. Growing towns and cities also place greater pressure on reservoirs, rivers and groundwater.

Yet England has not completed a new major reservoir for more than 30 years. Havant Thicket is expected to become the first around 2030, while water companies have committed to bringing nine new reservoirs into operation by 2050.

The issue is not that nobody knew demand would rise. Population growth was measurable, housing development was planned and concerns about future shortages were repeatedly documented.

Britain increased the number of people relying on the system without expanding strategic capacity at anything close to the same rate. That is not long term planning. It is decades of delayed catch up.

Reservoirs Matter

England’s reservoir storage fell from 94% at the end of February to 75.3% by late July, leaving it around 7.4 percentage points below the seasonal average. Almost half of monitored reservoirs were below normal levels.

The fact that reservoirs were almost full in February does not prove that Britain has sufficient storage. It proves that the wet winter provided a buffer, while the speed at which that buffer was depleted demonstrates why additional capacity matters.

Reservoirs allow a country to capture water during wet periods and use it when rainfall collapses. Not every drop can or should be stored, because rivers, wetlands and groundwater also need replenishing. But after adding more than 11 million people to the population, it is extraordinary that England went more than three decades without completing a major new reservoir.

It is about reservoirs, but it is not only about reservoirs. Britain also needs sufficient treatment capacity, local storage tanks, stronger connections between regions and the ability to move water from areas with greater supplies to those experiencing pressure.

The restrictions affecting around 33,000 properties in west Wales illustrate this wider problem. Dŵr Cymru said its treatment works were operating at maximum capacity, with additional water being moved around the network wherever possible.

That does not make reservoirs less important. It shows that the entire chain matters, from capturing raw water to treating, storing and delivering it.

Bills Have Risen by a Third in Two Years

This lack of resilience would be frustrating enough if households were paying less. They are not.

The national average water bill across England and Wales was £480 in 2024/25. Water UK forecast an average of £603 for 2025/26, followed by £639 for 2026/27. That is an increase of £159 in two years, or around 33%.

The water industry says these increases are helping to fund a £104 billion investment programme between 2025 and 2030. The money is intended to improve supplies, replace ageing infrastructure, reduce pollution and provide greater resilience.

Investment is clearly needed. The question is why households are only now being presented with the bill for decades of insufficient infrastructure.

Why were major reservoirs not built earlier? Why were treatment works not expanded as the population grew? Why were connections between water supply areas not strengthened before shortages and restrictions returned?

Households paid water bills throughout the entire period in which the population increased and infrastructure failed to keep pace. They are now being asked to pay substantially more while also being told to consume less.

Nearly One Litre in Five Is Still Lost

The questions become even harder when leakage is considered.

Nearly 19% of the water supplied in England is lost through leaks. The Environment Agency describes that level as unacceptably high and warns that delays to new supply projects could undermine future resilience.

Leakage can never be eliminated completely. Britain has a vast network of ageing pipes, many buried beneath roads and difficult to inspect or repair. But losing almost one fifth of the supply remains difficult to defend when millions of households face higher bills and restrictions.

Consumers are told to take shorter showers, avoid watering their gardens and stop washing their cars. At the same time, a substantial amount of treated water is lost before reaching anyone’s tap.

Households have a responsibility not to waste water. Water companies have a responsibility not to lose it.

What Are We Paying For?

That is the central question.

The UK population has increased by 11.5 million people in 30 years. England completed no major new reservoir during that period. Nearly 19% of the water supplied in England is still lost through leakage, while average bills across England and Wales have risen by around a third in two years.

Customers are now being asked to finance a vast programme of catch up investment after infrastructure failed to expand alongside the population it was meant to serve.

Some responsibility belongs to the water companies. Some belongs to regulators that approved investment plans and price settlements. Some belongs to successive governments that allowed strategic projects to remain trapped in planning and consultation.

But the failure does not primarily belong to the household using a garden hose.

The public has paid water bills for decades. It is now paying substantially higher bills and being asked to accept restrictions when the system comes under pressure. It is reasonable to ask what level of resilience that money has purchased.

The Bottom Line

The current drought has been caused by exceptionally low rainfall, sustained high temperatures and rising demand. That is not in dispute.

But its consequences have been made worse by a country whose population grew rapidly while essential infrastructure failed to keep pace.

Britain needs more reservoirs, greater treatment capacity, stronger regional connections and faster progress on repairing leaking pipes. These investments should have been delivered alongside population and housing growth, rather than decades later through catch up programmes funded by sharply rising bills.

The weather caused the drought. Population growth increased the pressure. Decades of weak infrastructure planning left the system exposed.

Until that changes, Britain will continue moving from wet winters to summer restrictions while customers are left asking a perfectly reasonable question:

What exactly have we been paying for?

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📚 You might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

The Burnham Bounce: Who Is Labour Winning Back?

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:00:35 GMT

Andy Burnham has changed the political weather.

After more than a year in which Reform UK dominated the opinion polls, Labour is suddenly back in contention. Three pollsters now have the governing party either level with or ahead of Nigel Farage’s party.

The Burnham bounce is real.

But the detail suggests Burnham is mainly persuading people who previously supported Labour to come home. There is far less evidence that he is winning over large numbers of committed Reform voters.

Burnham has begun rebuilding Labour’s old electoral coalition.

He has not yet proved that he can expand it.

Labour Is Back in the Race

The latest polling represents a striking reversal.

More in Common has Labour on 28%, four points ahead of Reform on 24%.

YouGov has the two parties tied on 22%, with the Conservatives close behind.

Survation has Labour on 26%, two points ahead of Reform. Before Starmer announced his resignation, the same pollster had Labour trailing Reform by eight points.

The exact figures vary, as they always do between polling companies. But the direction is consistent.

Labour is rising. Reform’s clear lead has disappeared. The Greens have also lost ground.

This is no longer one unusual poll that can be dismissed as an outlier. Different pollsters, using different methods, are detecting the same movement.

Labour is back in the contest.

Who Is Paying for the Burnham Bounce?

The most interesting question is not simply whether Labour has gained support.

It is where that support could come from under Burnham.

More in Common tested a hypothetical election with Burnham leading Labour. In that scenario, Labour rose six points to 27%, narrowly ahead of Reform on 26%.

The report found that Burnham’s strongest gains came from rebuilding Labour’s support among voters on the centre left:

• 15% of current Liberal Democrat voters said they would switch to Labour
• 14% of current Green voters said they would switch
• A quarter of those who did not know how they would vote chose Labour
• 4% of current Reform voters said they would switch
• 4% of current Conservative voters also moved to Labour

These are not confirmed movements in the latest voting intention polls. They are responses to a hypothetical question about how people would vote with Burnham leading Labour.

But the pattern is still revealing.

Burnham’s greatest strength appears to be among voters who had drifted towards the Greens, Liberal Democrats or indecision. His appeal reaches across the political spectrum, but the evidence suggests only limited movement from Reform and the Conservatives.

This looks less like Burnham constructing a completely new Labour coalition and more like him rebuilding the one Labour has lost.

That is still significant. Labour’s decline under Starmer involved voters moving in several directions. Some went to Reform, some to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, while others became undecided.

Burnham appears capable of bringing parts of that fragmented coalition back together.

But recovering former Labour voters is only the first stage. To build a lasting election winning coalition, he will also need to persuade more of the voters who have moved firmly to Reform or the Conservatives.

He may be repairing Labour’s foundations.

The harder task is building beyond them.

Burnham Is Bigger Than Labour

Burnham’s personal polling is currently much stronger than his party’s.

Asked who would make the better prime minister, 48% choose Burnham, compared with 22% choosing Nigel Farage.

That gives Labour an advantage it did not possess during Starmer’s final months. Burnham can reach voters who had stopped listening to the party.

But it also exposes a potential weakness.

Burnham is significantly more popular than a Labour Party still polling in the twenties.

Voters may like him, prefer him to the alternatives and be prepared to give him a chance without yet being ready to vote Labour.

Personal popularity can lift a party.

It cannot permanently protect that party from unpopular decisions, weak public services or a struggling economy.

For now, Burnham is being judged against an unpopular predecessor and against what voters hope he might become.

Soon he will be judged against his own results.

Every Honeymoon Ends

Burnham is enjoying the easiest period of his premiership.

He is new. He communicates differently from Starmer. Voters are judging his tone and intentions rather than the consequences of his decisions.

That will change.

Announcements are popular. Funding them is harder.

Promising reform is popular. Deciding who pays is harder.

Burnham will eventually face the same pressures that damaged Starmer: weak economic growth, strained public services and voters who demand improvement but resist higher taxes.

For now, the public is giving him a hearing.

But a honeymoon measures hope.

Governing measures delivery.

The Election Gamble

Burnham has ruled out an early general election, and Labour already possesses a working Commons majority of 166.

That majority allows the government to pass legislation, survive rebellions and govern without relying on smaller parties.

An election would put that advantage at risk.

Even after the bounce, Labour remains in the twenties. That may be enough to finish first in a fragmented political system, but it is unlikely to reproduce the overwhelming majority secured in 2024.

Yet if Labour continues rising, the pressure to seek a personal mandate will grow.

Burnham inherited the premiership. He did not lead Labour into government at the last election.

Going to the country would allow him to campaign on his own programme while his personal popularity remains high and before difficult decisions begin eroding the goodwill he currently enjoys.

But it would be an extraordinary gamble.

Burnham could strengthen his personal authority while weakening his government’s position in Parliament. A commanding majority could become a narrow one, a minority administration or a hung parliament.

Go early and risk surrendering a majority most prime ministers could only dream of.

Wait and risk watching the honeymoon fade before asking voters for their verdict.

A Bounce, Not a Verdict

Andy Burnham has already achieved something significant.

Labour is back in contention. Reform’s clear polling lead has disappeared. Voters who had moved towards the Greens, Liberal Democrats or indecision are taking another look.

But Burnham is mainly recovering people Labour had already lost.

The evidence does not yet show that he is winning large numbers of committed Reform voters or constructing a broader electoral coalition.

That is the next test.

For now, voters are judging the promise of his premiership rather than its consequences.

The difficult decisions are still to come.

The Burnham bounce is real.

But it is a honeymoon, not a verdict.

What do you think? Should Burnham use his early popularity to seek his own mandate, or would an early election be a reckless gamble?

Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

If you found this analysis useful, please share it and subscribe for more.

📚 You might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

Britain Is Losing Wealth, And Everyone Will Pay

Jamie Jenkins — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:01:18 GMT

Britain now has fewer real-terms millionaires than at any point since 2008.

The Adam Smith Institute estimates there were around 442,000 sterling millionaires in Britain in 2025, down 7% in a single year.

Some will celebrate that.

They should not.

Britain does not become richer simply by having fewer rich people. Unless those lower down the wealth distribution are becoming better off, a shrinking millionaire population means less real private wealth in the country.

That matters for investment, businesses, jobs and tax revenues.

What Counts as a Millionaire?

The Adam Smith Institute defines a sterling millionaire as an adult UK resident with net wealth of at least £1 million.

That includes property, pensions, savings, investments and business assets, minus debts.

The threshold is measured in constant 2025 prices.

This matters because inflation can create millionaires on paper without making anyone genuinely richer. Someone whose assets rise from £950,000 to £1 million may cross the nominal threshold while losing purchasing power.

The tracker is therefore designed to measure real wealth, not the illusion created by rising prices.

The Lowest Level Since 2008

The Institute estimates that Britain had around 442,000 real-terms sterling millionaires in 2025.

That is:

• 7% lower than in 2024

• The lowest estimated level since 2008

• A reversal of the growth seen during much of the previous decade

The Institute attributes the decline to falling inflation-adjusted asset values, Britain’s low savings rate and the departure of wealthy individuals.

Higher interest rates and weaker asset growth have reduced the real value of some property, pensions and investments.

The report also argues that Labour’s changes to the non-dom regime, high taxation and the threat of further wealth taxes have made Britain less attractive to internationally mobile people.

What the Figures Can Tell Us

The figure of 442,000 is an estimate, not a census.

The Institute begins with total UK household wealth and uses a statistical model, calibrated against the Office for National Statistics Wealth and Assets Survey, to estimate how many people sit above the real £1 million threshold.

The model is better at identifying the direction of change than establishing a precise headcount.

It tells us that the estimated number of real-terms millionaires has fallen sharply.

It does not tell us exactly how much of that fall came from wealthy people leaving Britain.

Some will have dropped below the threshold because their homes, pensions or investments failed to keep pace with inflation.

Others may have taken on more debt.

Fewer people may be crossing upwards into millionaire status.

Some wealthy residents will also have left, while others may have decided not to move here.

The precise balance is uncertain.

The direction is not.

Britain is becoming less successful at creating, attracting and retaining real wealth.

Why This Matters to Everyone

The issue is not whether millionaires deserve special treatment.

It is whether Britain is retaining the people, businesses and capital that support the wider economy.

Britain’s public finances already depend heavily on a relatively small number of high earners. HM Revenue and Customs estimates that the top 1% of Income Tax payers contributed around 29% of Income Tax.

Millionaires and the top 1% are not exactly the same group, but there is considerable overlap between wealth, high earnings, business ownership, investment income and taxable gains.

When wealthy and economically active people leave, the Treasury can lose Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, dividend tax, stamp duties, business taxes and future Inheritance Tax receipts.

Public spending does not automatically fall when taxpayers leave.

The burden can instead shift towards middle earners through frozen thresholds, higher employment taxes and broader tax rises.

Wealth also provides capital to businesses.

It is invested in companies, shares, pensions, commercial property and start-ups. That supports jobs, innovation and business expansion.

Not every millionaire is an entrepreneur.

But many business founders, investors and senior professionals bring experience, networks and access to capital.

When one of them leaves, Britain may lose more than one taxpayer. It can lose future investment, jobs, business activity and commercial connections.

Fewer Rich People Does Not Mean Less Poverty

A fall in the number of millionaires does not automatically improve the lives of people on low incomes.

It does not guarantee higher wages, more housebuilding, better public services, stronger productivity or lower poverty.

Nor does it prove that wealth has moved downwards.

There is a major difference between reducing inequality by making poorer households richer and reducing inequality by making wealthier households poorer.

Only the first represents genuine progress.

A fall in property or pension wealth after inflation is not redistribution.

It is simply wealth erosion.

Britain Cannot Tax Its Way to Prosperity

British politics spends far more time arguing about how to divide wealth than how to create it.

Each new tax may appear targeted in isolation, but together they affect whether successful and internationally mobile people choose to live, invest and build businesses here.

The abolition of the previous non-dom regime may raise more revenue from those who remain.

It may also encourage some to leave and deter others from arriving.

The final outcome depends on behaviour, not simply the tax rate written on paper.

Capital, talent and businesses are mobile.

Britain cannot assume they will stay regardless of how they are treated.

Conclusion

The fall in Britain’s millionaire population should not be dismissed as a problem only for the rich.

Some of the decline reflects property, pensions and investments failing to keep pace with inflation. Some may reflect weak savings. Some, according to the Adam Smith Institute, reflects wealthy people leaving or choosing not to come here.

The precise balance is uncertain.

The warning is not.

A country that loses investors, entrepreneurs and highly mobile taxpayers risks losing capital, businesses, jobs and tax revenue with them.

Britain does not become richer by having fewer rich people.

It becomes richer by enabling more people to create, earn, save and invest.

Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📚 If you found this useful, you might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

This Week with Mike Graham: Burnham in Reverse? Undoing Labour’s Mess

Jamie Jenkins — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 06:01:50 GMT

Every week, I join Mike Graham on the to break down the numbers behind the biggest political and economic stories.

This week, we discussed Andy Burnham’s first days in Downing Street and the speed at which he has started reversing Keir Starmer’s policies. The £3 bus fare cap is going back to £2, the early release of prisoners has been paused, digital ID spending is being redirected and a cut to VAT on electricity has been announced.

Burnham clearly wants to present himself as the man cleaning up Starmer’s mess. But reversing unpopular policies is the easy part. The real challenge is showing that he has a credible plan of his own.

Watch the full discussion below.

Labour Is Reversing Labour

The speed of these reversals tells us plenty about the past two years. Labour introduced these policies, defended them and insisted they were necessary. Now, under a new leader, Labour is rapidly taking them apart.

That may be politically smart, but it raises an obvious question: what was the point of the Starmer government? Changing the person at the top does not erase the record of the party that introduced the policies in the first place.

Burnham may look and sound different, but he still inherits the same economic problems, the same public finances and the same difficult trade-offs.

£45 Back, But Taxes Are Still Rising

The proposed cut to VAT on electricity has been presented as meaningful help for households. The estimated saving is around £45 over six months, which works out at roughly 90 pence a week.

That sounds far less generous when compared with the wider tax burden. By my calculations, the average full time worker is paying around £888 more each year in Income Tax and National Insurance than before Labour entered government.

Much of that increase comes from frozen tax thresholds. As wages rise, more income is taxed, more lower paid workers are pulled into the tax system and more middle earners are dragged into the 40 per cent rate.

Mike and I also discussed the possibility of raising the personal allowance, which has remained frozen at £12,570 since 2021. Increasing it would be welcome, but it would also reduce government revenue at a time when borrowing remains high.

If Burnham raises the threshold, he must be honest about what replaces the lost revenue. Will spending be cut, will borrowing rise or will another tax increase take its place?

The government cannot take hundreds of pounds more through the tax system, return £45 and call it generosity.

Britain’s Bigger Energy Problem

Burnham has also spoken about reversing the deindustrialisation of Britain. That will not happen while British businesses face some of the highest electricity costs in the developed world.

Industrial electricity prices in the UK are around four times those faced by businesses in the United States and are among the highest in Europe. That makes Britain a far less attractive place to manufacture goods, invest in factories or create energy intensive jobs.

A temporary VAT reduction may help households at the margins, but it does nothing to solve the deeper competitiveness problem. If Burnham is serious about rebuilding British industry, he must confront the cost of energy and the policies driving those costs higher.

Without that, talk of reindustrialisation is simply another slogan.

Can Burnham End Rough Sleeping?

We also discussed Burnham’s promise to end rough sleeping across Britain. Nobody disagrees with the ambition, but his record in Greater Manchester deserves scrutiny.

In 2010, the official snapshot recorded around 41 people sleeping rough across Greater Manchester. The figure increased sharply during the following years, reaching around 268 shortly before Burnham became mayor.

Numbers later fell, particularly during the pandemic, when emergency accommodation schemes moved people off the streets. However, over the past four years, rough sleeping in Greater Manchester has been rising again.

Burnham is not personally responsible for every case, but if this is going to become a flagship national promise, voters are entitled to examine what happened in the region he governed for nearly a decade.

A national pledge is less convincing when the recent local trend is moving in the wrong direction.

The Bottom Line

Andy Burnham is undoubtedly a better communicator than Keir Starmer. He speaks more naturally, looks more comfortable in public and appears capable of delivering a speech without every sentence being written down in front of him.

But good presentation is not the same as good government.

So far, Burnham’s programme is largely built around reversing Starmer. That may win him some early applause, but it does not yet amount to a credible economic plan.

Burnham wants the country to believe Labour has changed. For now, it looks more like the same government driving rapidly in reverse.

Watch the full discussion above and let me know what you think.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📚 If you found this useful, you might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

£45 Off Your Energy Bill. £888 More in Direct Tax.

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:51:28 GMT

Andy Burnham has begun his premiership with a promise to put money back into people’s pockets.

From 1 October, VAT on domestic electricity will fall from 5 per cent to zero. The government says this will reduce the annual Ofgem price cap by around £45.

Any reduction in household bills is welcome. But this announcement needs to be placed against the wider financial reality facing workers.

The average full time employee is paying around £888 more in Income Tax and National Insurance than in 2024/25.

For every £1 Labour is offering back through the electricity bill, nearly £20 is being taken through direct taxation.

That is the reality behind the giveaway.

The Tax Rise Dwarfs the Energy Saving

Earlier this year, I calculated the effect of frozen Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds on an average full time worker.

Median annual earnings were £37,430 in 2024/25. Based on projected wage growth, that rises to around £40,601 in 2026/27.

Normally, rising wages should leave workers better off. But because tax thresholds have been frozen, a growing share of that income is being pulled into the tax system.

The calculation showed:

• Direct tax in 2024/25: £6,961

• Direct tax in 2026/27: £7,849

• Increase in Income Tax and National Insurance: £888

Against that increase, the government is offering households an annualised £45 reduction in electricity costs.

The difference in scale is enormous. The additional direct tax paid by one average worker is almost twenty times the value of the energy reduction offered to the entire household.

In a household with two average earners, the combined increase in direct tax would be around £1,776. The electricity saving would still apply only once.

This is not a substantial tax cut or a meaningful reversal of the pressure placed on working families.

It is a small amount being handed back after much more has already been taken.

The £45 Headline Is Annualised

The VAT reduction begins on 1 October 2026.

The government says it will reduce the yearly Ofgem price cap by around £45, cost approximately £850 million during 2026/27 and lower Consumer Prices Index inflation by around 0.10 percentage points.

But funding has so far been identified only for the period from October to the end of this financial year. The government has not guaranteed that the VAT reduction will continue beyond March 2027.

If the policy ends then, a household using a typical amount of electricity would save closer to £22 or £23 during the currently funded period. The exact amount would depend on consumption.

So the £45 is not necessarily the cash saving households will receive this financial year.

It is an annualised headline attached to a policy that has not yet been guaranteed for a full year.

Energy Bills Are Still £294 Higher

The current Ofgem price cap for a typical dual fuel household paying by direct debit is £1,862 a year.

When Labour entered government in July 2024, the equivalent cap was £1,568.

That means the current cap is:

• £294 higher than in July 2024

• Almost 19 per cent higher

Even after applying the full £45 annualised VAT reduction, the cap would remain around £249 above the level Labour inherited.

Labour can claim it is reducing one element of the bill. It cannot credibly claim that household energy has become cheaper since it entered office.

The longer term comparison tells the same story:

• 2019: around £1,137

• July 2024: £1,568

• July 2026: £1,862

The international energy crisis caused a huge increase during 2022. Prices later fell from their peak, but they remain far above their pre crisis level and are rising again.

Removing VAT reduces the visible price. It does not increase domestic production, improve energy security or reduce the underlying cost of the energy system.

Burnham Promises to End Rough Sleeping Again

Energy bills were not Burnham’s only opening promise. He has also pledged to tackle homelessness and end long term rough sleeping in England.

It is an admirable objective, but his record in Greater Manchester deserves scrutiny because he made a similar commitment after becoming mayor in 2017.

My calculation, adding together the official snapshot figures for Greater Manchester’s ten local authorities, shows the estimated number of people sleeping rough on a single autumn night was:

• 2010: 41

• 2017: 268

• 2021: 90

• 2025: 197

Burnham can legitimately point to a substantial fall during the early part of his mayoralty. The figure declined from 268 in 2017 to 90 in 2021, which was real progress.

But the pandemic was also important. The national Everyone In programme, emergency accommodation and temporarily available hotel rooms helped produce unusually low rough sleeping figures during 2020 and 2021.

Since that low point, the trend has reversed. By 2025, the Greater Manchester total had risen to 197, more than double the 2021 figure.

It remains below the exceptionally high level Burnham inherited, so it would be unfair to claim that no progress was achieved.

But he promised to eradicate rough sleeping in Greater Manchester.

He did not.

Rough sleeping was reduced. It was not eradicated.

Burnham is now making a similar promise nationally. His record suggests the public should demand measurable milestones, transparent reporting and a clear definition of success.

Promises are easy. The numbers will show whether anything genuinely changes.

Labour’s Old Problems Rearranged

Burnham has presented his arrival as a break with the Starmer government.

There have been significant changes, with John Healey becoming Chancellor, Louise Haigh becoming First Secretary of State and Minister for the Cabinet Office, and Ed Miliband becoming Foreign Secretary.

But the Cabinet still relies heavily on familiar figures from Labour’s existing government.

Shabana Mahmood remains Home Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds remains at Business, Heidi Alexander remains at Transport and Lisa Nandy remains responsible for Culture, Media and Sport.

This is not a government built from outside the political establishment. It is largely the same parliamentary Labour Party, with ministers retained, promoted or moved between departments.

Many served in the government that delivered higher taxes, falling payroll employment, weak growth and declining public confidence.

The decision to bring Burnham back from Greater Manchester suggests Labour did not believe any of the obvious candidates already around the Cabinet table could restore public confidence.

Burnham can present himself as a change from Starmer, but he is not a political outsider. He first entered Parliament in 2001 and previously served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary and Health Secretary.

This is an experienced Labour insider returning to Westminster because those already there were not considered capable of rescuing the government.

A new person is in Number 10. Much of the political operation underneath remains familiar.

The First Test of Burnham’s Government

Burnham wants Britain to believe this is a fresh start, but the first evidence is underwhelming.

A £45 annualised electricity reduction is being offered to workers paying around £888 more in direct tax. The policy begins in October, but it has not been guaranteed beyond March. If it ends then, the benefit during the currently funded period would be closer to £22 or £23.

Energy bills remain almost £300 above the level Labour inherited.

Burnham promised to eradicate rough sleeping in Greater Manchester.

He did not.

Much of the same Labour political class remains in government.

Burnham deserves to be judged fairly. Removing VAT from electricity is better than leaving it in place. Reducing rough sleeping is a worthwhile objective. Changing ministers can sometimes improve a government.

But the scale of what has been announced should not be exaggerated.

A possible £22 or £23 saving will not transform household finances. A promise does not end homelessness. A Cabinet reshuffle does not automatically create competence.

Britain does not need another political relaunch built around announcements that shrink when placed beside the data.

It needs lower taxes, genuinely cheaper energy, measurable reductions in rough sleeping and ministers capable of delivering results.

So far, Labour has changed its leader. It has not yet proved that it has changed direction.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins

Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📚 If you found this useful, you might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates:

The Government Statistics Cover-Up — Labour Hides Migrant Crime Data

Jamie Jenkins — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:01:43 GMT

The Government holds detailed statistics showing the nationalities of people convicted of serious crimes in Britain.

The Centre for Migration Control used the Freedom of Information Act to request those figures. When the Ministry of Justice refused, the organisation challenged the decision—and won.

The Information Commissioner ordered the Government to disclose the data.

Rather than accept that ruling, Labour’s Ministry of Justice has launched a legal appeal to prevent publication.

That deserves to be called what it is: a government statistics cover-up.

The Data the Public Has Been Denied

In June 2025, the Centre for Migration Control requested conviction data covering 2018 to 2024, broken down by nationality and detailed offence.

The request included serious categories such as violence, sexual offences, drugs, weapons, theft, robbery and arson.

It would amount to one of the most detailed releases of conviction data by nationality ever published in Britain.

The Ministry of Justice refused.

The Centre for Migration Control complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces freedom of information law.

On 22 June 2026, the Information Commissioner ruled that the Ministry must disclose the information.

Migration Central

Labour government launches legal bid to block publication of migrant crime statistics

The Labour government is heading to court to block the publication of migrant crime statistics…

2 months ago · 129 likes · 11 comments · Centre for Migration Control

The Government’s Excuses Were Rejected

The Ministry of Justice relied mainly on two arguments.

First, it claimed that publishing the figures could risk identifying individuals from small statistical groups.

The Information Commissioner rejected that argument.

Official statisticians already have well-established ways of handling small numbers, including suppressing or combining cells where there is a genuine confidentiality risk.

The Ministry also argued that producing the data would cost too much.

That argument was rejected as well.

The Information Commissioner found that the department had not shown that the Freedom of Information cost exemption applied.

The Ministry could have accepted the independent ruling and published the evidence.

Instead, on 17 July 2026, it appealed to the First-tier Tribunal in an attempt to keep the figures hidden.

Why These Statistics Matter

Britain is already having a heated debate about immigration and crime.

But that debate is taking place without a consistent national publication showing convictions by nationality.

Instead, the public sees isolated figures released by individual police forces, campaign groups or newspapers using different definitions and covering different periods.

That is a poor basis for serious analysis.

A proper national publication would allow the public to examine:

How many foreign nationals are convicted each year
Which offences those convictions relate to
How patterns differ between nationalities
Whether convictions are increasing or falling
Whether claims made by politicians and campaigners are supported by the evidence

The figures might confirm some public concerns.

They might disprove others.

Either way, the answer is publication, not secrecy.

The Data Needs Context

Conviction totals alone would not tell us everything.

Countries with larger populations in Britain would normally be expected to record more convictions than countries represented by only a few thousand people.

Age and sex also matter because criminal offending is heavily concentrated among younger men across populations.

Any responsible publication should therefore include clear definitions, appropriate confidentiality controls, information on missing nationality and, where reliable figures exist, population estimates that allow meaningful rates to be calculated.

But these are arguments for publishing the data properly.

They are not arguments for withholding it.

Secrecy simply creates the conditions in which selective claims and misinformation thrive.

These Statistics Should Be Published Routinely

As a former government statistician, I find the Ministry of Justice’s position particularly difficult to defend.

Official statistics exist to serve the public good. They should inform democratic debate, support accountability and allow the public to judge whether government policies are working.

There is clearly substantial public, political and media interest in the relationship between nationality and criminal offending.

These figures should not need to be dragged out of government through repeated Freedom of Information requests.

The Ministry of Justice should establish a regular official statistical publication covering convictions by nationality, supported by:

Consistent definitions
Appropriate confidentiality protections
Breakdowns by age and sex where possible
Population denominators where robust estimates are available
Comparable figures over time
Clear information on data quality and limitations

That would be far better than releasing isolated spreadsheets only after legal pressure.

It would allow journalists, researchers and the public to analyse the evidence consistently. It would also expose exaggerated or misleading claims from every side of the debate.

The proper statistical response is not simply to comply with this one request.

It is to publish the information routinely, transparently and with the context required for responsible interpretation.

Where reliable data exists and there is a clear public need, the presumption should be publication.

Publish the Data

Nobody outside the Ministry of Justice yet knows exactly what the unpublished figures will show.

They may reveal serious disparities between nationalities.

They may show that some claims about migrant crime are overstated.

Either possibility strengthens the case for publication.

If the figures are unremarkable, releasing them would help challenge misinformation.

If they reveal genuine public-safety problems, ministers need to confront them.

Neither outcome justifies secrecy.

These statistics were collected by public institutions using public money.

They do not belong to ministers.

The Ministry of Justice should abandon its appeal, release the requested information and commit to publishing properly contextualised conviction data by nationality on a regular basis.

The Centre for Migration Control requested the data. The Ministry refused. The Information Commissioner ordered its release. Labour responded by going to court.

Whatever the figures eventually reveal, the Government’s effort to keep them hidden is already revealing enough.

✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions

📢 Call to Action

If this helped cut through the noise, share it and subscribe free by entering your email in the box below and get the stats before the spin, straight to your inbox (no algorithms).

📚 If you found this useful, you might also want to read:

📲 Follow me here for more daily updates: