progressive population growth, regressive outsourcing, and statistical illiteracy
fieldnotes, entry two, w/c 25th november
Poorly thought through notes of things that have prompted my thinking recently, across a variety of mediums. Low levels of proof reading, moderate levels of fact checking, high levels of yapping.
Population growth is a progressive issue
Last months ONS figures showed a 1% growth in the UK population between 2022-23, primarily as a result of inward migration, with birth rates declining overall. While discourse around these statistics, and indeed population growth in the UK as a whole has been led by the dog-whistle heavy right-wing, there is a strong case to be made that population growth is, and should be, a progressive issue. More than the need to just avoid capture of this issue by those whose approach is built on an often misogynistic approach to birth-rates, that sees child-bearing and rearing as the sole purpose of womanhood, the lefts approach to the barriers that exist in relation to childbirth in the UK is devoid of any of the future-facing hope-filled politics needed to capture and retain the British imagination over the next decade.
There are very real barriers to choosing to have a child in the UK - it’s expensive to raise, and care for a child; women who take time out to care for children are left significantly financially worse off over their lifetimes as a result (up to £100k worse off in retirement than their male counterparts), and an increasingly reliance on privately rented housing amongst younger women and couples creates a sense of instability that cannot be overlooked. But it cannot be enough for us to simply respond to conversations about this issue by citing these barriers, devoid of any solution or alternative offering.
Any vision for a progressive Britain should address this head on without concern or heed for right-wing weirdos who spend their time online obsessing over their personal beef with women in the workplace or some similar nonsense; people should not be deprived of parenthood by virtue of a set of socio-political circumstances that any government worth its salt should consider within its remit to solve. Moreover, the increase in the average age of the population that comes alongside population decline brings with it a myriad of issues that the left should also care about - young people support and care for older people, including economically, and contribute to social programmes, economic growth, technological progress and innovation. The impact of this decline is most harmful to the most vulnerable; the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.
Rather than piecemeal reforms such as those nominal extensions of parental leave seen in the Employment Rights Bill, the left in Britain should look towards countries like France (sorry), whose birthrates have remained stable as a result of deliberate pro-natalist policies that have been in place for decades. The counter to right-wing dog whistling about pronatalism isn’t a list of problems, it’s tax breaks for parents, family allowances, properly funded childcare, an NI contribution framework that accounts for maternity leave, and a vision that empowers, not precludes, parenthood in Britain for those who want it.
Outsourced inefficiency
The British states obsession with outsourcing continues unabated - this time caterers, housekeepers, security guards and porters at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon are striking after Serco refused to pass on NHS bonuses to their staff, seeking to pocket the negotiated surplus instead. It’s the third location in the country where strike action has been taken by Serco employees on this issue, after North Devon and Wiltshire sites secured their previously withheld bonuses earlier this year.
For years ‘service providers’ like Serco, Aramark, G4S and others have mismanaged British services for huge fees - mismanaging sites, lying about outcomes, and in some cases, charging for work they had never carried out. It seems insane that we continue to allow these same providers to run so many of our schools, hospitals, prisons, railways, immigration services, GP services, probation services, speed cameras (if this list seems ridiculously long it’s because it IS. You could write a novel length list of the services outsourced to these firms and still have some left over).
The conduct of these providers beggars belief too - in October Serco were fined for failing to fit outgoing prisoners with electronic tags (this follows their sanctioning a decade ago for routinely charging the state for tags that didn’t exist); at the beginning of the year Serco were formally warned by the ICO after it emerged they were unlawfully using facial recognition technology to monitor 2,000 workers at leisure centres under their management; and last year they were fined twice by the IOSH after management failings led to the death of a custody officer at Blackfriars Crown Court, and the death of a passenger caused by a Serco litter picker in Norfolk (both additional services Serco manage). In fact the number of services Serco provide well and effectively is few and far between - per performance reports it appears to exclusively consist of linen cleaning and pest control. The same is true for the many other generically named ‘service providers’, whose mismanagement of the services the public interacts with most frequently adds up in the face of perceived societal decline amongst the general public.
On Crime
On general perceived societal decline though, it’s often possible that simple solutions can be worse than their complex and overwrought counterparts; see this, from #CrushCrime, which boldly and bravely makes the all new suggestion that we reduce crime rates by increasing sentences. The case on its surface is compelling - “10% of offenders are responsible for at least HALF of all crime in Britain” - less compelling though is that that is where any semblance of reflection or analysis seems to end. You don’t need to take my word for this; you can take the word of the previous Conservative government, who in 2022 set out a 10 year plan for tackling exactly this issue;
There are more than 300,000 heroin and crack addicts in England who, between them, are responsible for nearly half of all burglaries, robberies and other acquisitive crime. These serial offenders should be properly punished for the crimes they commit, crimes which cause misery in communities across the country. But they should also be given the chance to get off drugs and turn their lives around. Because if we can turn around the lives of addicts, the communities in which they live will experience lower crime, lower disorder and less violence.
You’ll note though, that the analysis here paints a slightly different picture. Not only are the offenders to which ‘Crush Crime’ refers addicts, most have spent time in prison already. And in fact, statistics would suggest, most have begun, or continued to use drugs (specifically heroin and crack) while in the prison estate (between 2012/13 and 2017/18, the rate of positive random tests for drugs in prisons increased by 50%; 8% of women and 13% of men developed a problem with drugs for the first time whilst in prison).
The increase in the number of vulnerable young people (e.g. children in care, excluded from school) available for use and exploitation in county lines gangs, coupled with declining urban usage, means that the problem in question is squarely no longer a ‘city’ issue - in fact nearly all the areas with the lowest rates of usage are within London and the South-East. The average addict referred to by Crush Crime is a white, single or divorced, unemployed male, from outside of London. Drug use and its consequences remain an issue of inequality, in this case one geographically solidified by Britains increasing regional deprivation over the past decades.
The total cost of harms related to illicit drug use in England was £19.3 billion for 2017-18, which includes drug related crime (£9.3bn), and drug related deaths and homicides (£6.3bn). Just £553 million of that outlay related to drug treatment and prevention programmes, for a population that makes up not just 50% of UK crime stats, but also 50% of the prison estate. To contextualise this number - there are more crack and heroin users in the UK than there are Jewish people, Arab people, or GRT people. While it is a population with which many British people will never interface socially or professionally, it is not a small population, and it is not a population incapable of redress. Offenders, even repeat ‘super’ offenders, who are supported to get off drugs for good, are 19 percentage points less likely to return to a life of crime.
Conversely the available data shows that the impact of longer prison sentences is at best minute, and at worst significantly more expensive and less effective than a functional treatment programme. As CrushCrimes messaging so succinctly captures - longer sentences also do little to nothing to increase public confidence in the prison and justice systems either. Sentencing for the same crimes has increased in the UK over the last ten years (the ACSL for indictable offences increased 5.3 months, from 18.0 months in 2013 to 23.3 months in 2023), but the rate of offending for some same crimes has gone up in the same period.
71% of the costs listed above are borne by the families and carers of these people, who are significantly less likely now to be in the treatment programmes they need than they were 10 years ago. The cost of drug related social care for the children of these users was £633 million in 2017-18, and these impacts are overwhelmingly concentrated in the areas of England that are already the most deprived, even at the treatment end of the scale - the rate of deaths of heroin users in treatment is over six times higher in the most deprived areas of the UK compared to the least.
Certainly heroin and crack addicts are not an easy group to feel sympathy and empathy for - that is true sometimes even for those of us who count them amongst those we love. But this isn’t a ‘leftie, kumbaya, love all people’ centred critique - the fact is, the problem we face with petty crime today hasn’t emerged in isolation; instead it is a result of decades of cuts to the services that prevent these problems before they occur, a shift in spending to focus on the cure to social ills rather than their prevention, and a system increasingly ill-equipped to deal with the problems it is responsible for solving.
Having spent the last few months working on filling the data gaps in relation to phone thefts in London, in tandem with members of the Metropolitan Police and the GLA, I can attest that the solution to this problem isn’t sexy, doesn’t lend itself to catchy slogans or promo videos, and is unlikely to gain you much twitter clout. But there’s much to be said for a willingness to work slowly on a boring issue in a way that can be fundamentally effective in the long term, rather than taking all the hubris God has lent you and using it as a means to add yourself to the long list of flashy but fundamentally ineffective names floating around Whitehall’s whatsapp groups. #CrushCrushCrime doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though I suppose.
The now
Things I’m doing/thinking/reading this week - more frequent updates for this here
Reading: The Price of My Soul by Bernadette Devlin
Listening to: An English Gentleman, by Tortoise Investigates
Writing: (Still! - mostly editing at this point; brevity is evidently not my strong suit and it is unfortunately really really long). A long-form piece on long term illness and Britain’s productivity puzzle (prompted, in part, by a recent rereading of this Guardian piece from earlier this year)
Working on: co-designing a jobs bridging pilot programme for workers in areas of industrial transition - aiming to prevent industrial decline, and reindustrialise areas in decline, via green jobs. Though for now, just testing things out in Grimsby.