Tag: Social Policy

Official statistics and the 'neighbours from hell'

I have written today to the UK Statistics Authority to raise some questions about the government’s figures on “troubled families”. In December the Prime Minister explained:

Today, I want to talk about troubled families. Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. … We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money, but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families – that is around £75,000 per family.

The same figures have been repeated in a series of government statements, including material from the Department of Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the DWP.

The UK Statistics Authority exists to guarantee the integrity of official statistics in the UK. They have established a range of criteria for integrity, transparency and quality, but among other requirements they state that departments should

  • “Ensure that official statistics are produced according to scientific principles”
  • “Publish details of the methods adopted, including explanations of why particular choices were made.”
  • “Issue statistical reports separately from any other statement or comment about the figures and ensure that no statement or comment – based on prior knowledge – is issued to the press or published ahead of the publication of the statistics.”

That is not what’s happened here. “We’ve come up with the actual figures”, the PM’s statement says, and policy has been rolled out from that starting point. Some explanation of where the figure of 120,000 families come from appeared in a note from the Department of Education, though it was not publicized; there have been trenchant criticisms from Jonathan Portes and Ruth Levitas, on the basis that there is no connection between the indicators used to identify troubled families and the problems of crime and anti-social behaviour. The basis of the costings is still not publicly available. I’ve asked the Statistics Authority to consider whether there has been a breach of their Code of Practice.

Some figures to correct

On Thursday, when I reviewed some of the Daily Telegraph‘s figures on benefits, I took it that some of the wilder statements were down to the Telegraph reporter. Discovering similar figures in the Daily Mail made me wonder if they didn’t come from a common source, and on checking I found that they did: the main source is the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

In his speech to the Conservative conference at the beginning of October, Iain Duncan Smith said this:
“just before the election, in one year, Labour spent £90 billion on working age welfare – the same as the entire education budget for that very same year. … To put this in perspective, by 2010 this increase in welfare spending cost every household in Britain an extra £3,000 a year in tax.”

The Cabinet Office report for the Coalition, The State of the Nation (2010), claimed that “At least 12 million working-age households receive benefits each week (including tax credits and Child Benefit) at a cost of around £85 billion per annum” (p 10). With 20.4 million households in the UK, the cost per household was £4166. The DWP’s figures for the cost of working age benefits in 1997-98 are £31.3 bn in nominal terms and £46.4 billion in real terms. However, those figures exclude Child Benefit at £7 billion and Family Credit, the precursor of Tax Credits, at £2.3 billion; so the nominal figure for 1997 is £40.6 billion, which at the time with 18.7 million households was £2167 per household. So it is not true, even taking the figures in nominal terms, that households in 2010 were having to pay an extra £3000 a year for ‘working age’ welfare.

A second point raised in the Telegraph was the cost of “troubled” families. I questioned at the time whether this was an ‘official’ statistic’; but I have since found that it has been used by the Prime Minister, the DWP, the Home Office and the DCLG, and I have to concede that it is. The Prime Minister said last year:
“We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families – that is around £75,000 per family.”

There are two key figures here. The first is the number of families, which comes from a confusion between families with disadvantages and families which cause trouble. Professor Ruth Levitas, of the University of Bristol, has made a detailed analysis of the claims. She comments: “The most charitable explanation is that their research is statistically incompetent.” The second is the estimate of cost. The only detail I have about the costing is a statement from the Home Office that £2.57billion of this is attributed to crime and criminal justice. I haven’t been able to find any basis for the costings, and Ruth Levitas didn’t either.

The age of consent

Three news stories recently have focused on circumstances where under-age girls have been used by older men. In the Savile case, a celebrity regularly abused vulnerable young women. In Rochdale, a group of girls was systematically exploited by a cabal of pimps. In the third case, a fifteen-year old girl absconded with her teacher. There are several recurring themes here: illegality, the conduct of older men, breaches of trust, and in two cases at least, the failure of responsible authorities to protect the girls. The combination of celebrity and the role of the BBC has made the Savile case most prominent, but to my mind the Rochdale case is the most disturbing. The Times reported: “Policeman yawned loudly as girl, 15, described how she was forced to have sex.” The police had categorised this as a ‘lifestyle choice’.

Part of the problem here hangs on the way we think about ‘consent’. A 15 year old cannot legally give consent – but would any of these situations really have been acceptable if the girl was 16? There are reasons to think that the ‘age of consent’ is misnamed: we do not apply the same tests to a relationship with a boy or girl of the same age, and the law makes a distinction in the terms of the offence according to the age of the other person. The primary purpose of an age limit is to protect young people from exploitation from older people. And if we think about the issue in terms of the conduct of older people, rather than the independent judgment of the young person, the age at which protection from exploitation is withdrawn is too low.

Multiple disadvantage in Scotland

The Think Tank Demos has published a report about multiply disadvantaged families in Scotland. Families are described as “multiply disadvantaged” if they meet four or more of seven criteria:

  • low income
  • worklessness
  • no educational qualifications
  • overcrowding
  • ill health
  • mental health problems
  • poor neighbourhood.

There are 131,000 households who are multiply disadvantaged by this definition. Of those, 52,000 are pensioners, and 55,000 are households without children; 24,000 are households with children. The category of pensioners is based on 3 criteria of 6, because it excludes worklessness; overcrowding is not really a useful indicator either.

This is not the same test as the Westminster government uses for its definition of “troubled families”. That test is based on them meeting five of the following seven criteria:

  1. having a low income,
  2. no one in the family who is working
  3. poor housing,
  4. parents who have no qualifications,
  5. where the mother has a mental health problem
  6. one parent has a long-standing illness or disability, and
  7. where the family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes.

The overlap between the criteria does make it plausible to suggest, though, that someone who is “multiply disadvantaged” in the Demos report will probably also score four or more on the “troubled families” score. As the Demos authors note, there is no implication that families who are disadvantaged in these terms present problems for other people – but there is no reason to suppose that from the criteria for “troubled families” either. And there has to be some suspicion about the tenor of a report which goes on to tie the characteristics of poverty to alcohol, drug use and child neglect – none of which applies to most, or even to many, of the families identified through these statistics.

The finding that there are only 24,000 families with children in Scotland who are multiply disadvantaged even on as few as four indicators does raise some questions about the direction of policy, which has tended to focus on the characteristics and culture of poor people as something set apart. There are some points to draw from the figures:

  • Scotland is a society where more than one person in six of working age receives an ‘out of work’ benefit, and a quarter of Scotland’s children are in low income households – but the vast majority of people in this position are not ‘multiply disadvantaged’ by the definitions in this report
  • showing that social problems are more prevalent than elsewhere does not mean that they are actually likely – most people who are ‘multiply disadvantaged’ do not have them
  • if the number of families who might be said to be multiply disadvantaged by these criteria is small, the numbers who might after that be said to suffer ‘intergenerational deprivation’ in these terms is, necessarily, smaller still
  • while multiple disadvantage is a legitimate cause of concern in itself, it is neither typical of poor families or commonplace.

It makes sense to design policies that can effectively reach people who are most disadvantaged. Poverty in Scotland is much more widespread, however, and it makes no sense to make such policies the basis for anti-poverty strategy more generally.

Who benefits?

In Parliament this week, David Cameron rejected arguments that benefits for people with disabilities will be lower. This is from Hansard on 17th October:

Mr Bain: … Last week the Prime Minister promised that work would always pay, but this morning Baroness Grey-Thompson and the Children’s Society have revealed that his current plans for universal credit next year will mean that up to 116,000 disabled people in work could lose as much as £40 a week. Does not that say everything about how this divisive Prime Minister always stands up for the wrong people? At the same time as handing huge tax cuts to 8,000 people earning over £1 million a year he is going to penalise some of the bravest strivers in our country.

The Prime Minister: The hon. Gentleman raises an extremely serious issue; let me try to deal with as fully as I can. The money that is going into disability benefit will not go down under universal credit; it will go up. The overall amount of money will go from £1.35 billion last year to £1.45 billion in 2015. Under the plans, no recipients will lose out, unless their circumstances change. All current recipients are fully cash-protected by a transitional scheme. On future recipients, we have made an important decision and choice to increase the amount that we give to the most severely disabled children, and there will be a new lower amount for less disabled people. That is a choice that we are making. As I have said, we are increasing the overall amount of money and focusing on the most disabled. That shows the right values and the right approach.

Some of the points here are unclear. There is no such benefit as ‘disability benefit’, so it is hard to tell just what the PM is referring to – it is not ESA or the Income Support that is going to be included in Universal Credit. I am not sure which benefit cost £1.35 billion last year, but my best guess is that it was Disability Living Allowance for children, which was forecast in the last budget to be £1.31 billion. If that’s right, the figure is irrelevant – this is not a benefit that is going to be affected by Universal Credit at all. Current recipients are only protected ‘unless their circumstances change’, and that will include movements into and out of work, and reaching school leaving age.

Probably more important than the precise figures, however, is the general message. The PM says here that the government is “focusing on the most disabled” and that this is “the right approach”. But this approach was apparently rejected by Lord Freud, the responsible minister, in last month’s evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, when he explained that the priority was to liberate disabled people by giving them opportunities to work (see my note on A zero-sum game, 11th October). Is the government giving priority to those who are most disabled, or those who might be able to work? They are not often the same people.

Taser happy

It has been reported that police in Lancashire tasered a blind man by mistake. He was carrying a white stick and it was taken for a samurai sword.

I’ve followed this sort of case for a time, largely because I’ve undertaken previous work on complaints for HMICS (the Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland) and the Police Complaints Commissoner for Scotland. The main organisation dealing with these issues in the US is the National Association for Citizen Oversight of Law Enforcement, or NACOLE; they regularly report issues of this kind from the US. So, before Taser use in the UK became widespread, there were reports from NACOLE of a UCLA student tasered for refusing to leave the library, a great-grandmother tasered for arguing with a traffic policeman, and a deaf man tasered because he’d stayed too long in a store’s toilet and failed to come out when the shout of “police” was made. Given the track record, it was all too predictable that there’d be similar incidents in the UK as we took up the same technology.

Complaints against the police are generally levied against individual officers; there is a presumption that the officer who uses inappropriate force is individually at fault, and the complaint is routinely framed in these terms. This has things the wrong way about. The complaints that members of the public have about the conduct of officers are almost always complaints about the service, and it is never open to an individual member of the public to act against an individual officer. The problems stem from policy decisions, and it will only be through policy that adequate safeguards and controls can be developed.

The Liberals and benefit cuts

Nick Clegg has apparently said that he will oppose plans to cut benefits by a further £10 billion. “Who should tighten their belts first? I just start from a very simple principle that when we’re all having to make sacrifices … you ask people at the top and then you work down. You don’t ask people at the bottom and then work up.” He did previously agree, however, to £18 billion in cuts to benefit, at the same time as a reduction in the highest rate of income tax. That does suggest that Clegg’s ‘very simple principle’ is open to negotiation. The Guardian has reported that, according to Conservative sources, the further cuts are already agreed.

Does social security spending protect the economy?

It was once received wisdom in economic theory that social security had a beneficial effect on the economy, because it increased at times when demand was deficient. This is from a book published in 1960, Richardson’s Economic and Financial Aspects of Social Security (I have it on my bookshelf):
“The two main benefits that fall in prosperity and rise in depression are unemployment insurance and public assistance payments. They put a brake on books and reduce the severity of depressions. … If social security benefits are paid, business will not decline as far as it otherwise would.”

I referred to this argument briefly in a recent interview, and a note from Adrian Sinfield has encouraged me to look at it a little further. A couple of days ago, the IMF conceded that it has got the multipliers wrong – the extent to which changes in government spending stimulate or depress the economy. (The issue is explained on the TUC’s Touchstone website.) The multipliers are probably between 0.9 and 1.7; they were formerly assumed to be 0.5-0.6. If government spending stimulates the economy, it needs to be increased during a depression; cuts lead to economic decline. The multipliers say how big the effects are. And the size of the error means IMF has been underestimating both the benefits of increased spending, and the harm to the economy caused by cuts.

Social security benefits are not, however, quite the same as public spending – treating them as if they were is one of the central confusions of current policy. Most are transfer payments, meaning that someone gets money which otherwise someone else would have had. Transfer payments should be assumed in the first place to be neutral; they stimulate the economy if the people who receive are more likely to spend it than the people who are paying. It’s likely that this condition will be met, because people on very low incomes can’t save, but the effect is not the same as either government spending financed in other ways, or as spending on infrastructure. Spending money on unemployment assistance makes a modest contribution to stabilisation; spending it on public works or job creation stimulates the economy far more.

The cost of free services in Scotland

Robert Black, who recently retired as Auditor General in Scotland, argues in today’s Scotsman in favour of reviewing the cost of universal services – particularly free personal care and free transport. He acknowledges that the cost of free prescriptions and eye tests is less and that they have a preventive function. His position has been consistent; it was formerly argued in an Audit Scotland report, Scotland’s public finances.

Part of Bob’s case is unarguable – that public expenditure has an opportunity cost, and we should always be prepared to consider what the implications are of one decision relative to another. Some of the figures he uses, however, are contentious. The increase in prescription costs to £1 billion is a general cost of the NHS, not a specific cost of ‘free prescriptions’. They cost nearer to £80m, though I’ve been struggling to find an accurate figure – the rest of the £150m cited in costs is down to eye tests, which have been separately justified in terms of savings elsewhere. We’re told that the cost of the National Concessionary Travel Scheme (bus and travel passes) ‘could rise’ to £500m. Well, it could do anything in theory; much depends on inflation, much on future policy; but the budget for 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15 has been set at a constant £194m. There are certainly pressures on the public finances, but it’s not clear that it’s the universal benefits currently in dispute that are driving them.