The Daily Misleading Statistic

I tend to be of the opinion that the fewer people there are living in material deprivation the better. Normally, I would have considered this an uncontroversial belief but an article that has appeared today on the Daily Mail website has lead me to question if this is the case.

The Daily Mail and Douglas Carswell MP seemed to be of the opinion that fewer people being in deprivation simply shows that the welfare state is failing.
The Daily Mail asserts that the UK is the country with the most households without work in Europe and at the same time has far fewer people who live without a mobile phone, a TV and a holiday than other places in Europe.

According to Douglas Carswell this shows that “that the welfare system is not doing what it is supposed to do. It is meant to help people who need help because they have fallen on hard times, not people who have learned to play the system.”
There’s several things wrong with the logic involved in getting to that conclusion but the first problem with it, is that the premise on which it is based isn’t actually true.




The Mail’s source for these statistics is the EU body Eurostat. Yesterday, Eurostat put out a press release which highlighted that the risk of poverty was rising throughout the EU. As part of this release they included the figures for each EU country on the percentage of households which had a low employment intensity, and the percentage of households which were considered to be materially deprived.
The Daily Mail accurately reported the UK’s relative position in the two series of figures but their inaccuracy can be seen when looking at the definitions of “low employment intensity” and “seriously materially deprived” and how the Daily Mail chose to report them.

Low employment intensity covered households who were working less than 20% of their full potential over the course of a year, this could be someone only working 1 day a week, someone only finding two and a half months work of work, or one person working in a household with five adults. It is not a measure of workless households as the Daily Mail implied in its headline “UK has more homes where nobody has a job than anywhere else in Europe (but more families who can STILL go on holiday, have a TV and a mobile)”.

Luckily for people interested in the actual rate of households without work, Eurostat provide this statistic just a few clicks away from their press release. This shows that the UK actually appears somewhere near the middle on jobless households.


The other problem with the Daily Mail’s reporting is in Eurostat’s definition of “materially deprived”. Eurostats define you as materially deprived if you can’t afford four of the nine items. These items are: the ability to pay the rent or utility bills on time; to keep the house warm; to be able to pay an unexpected bill; to eat meat or fish every second day; to afford a week’s holiday; to run a car; to have a washing machine; to have a colour TV and to have a mobile phone.
The Mail seem to have latched on to the fact that some of the indicators included are owning a mobile, taking a holiday and owning a TV. In fact as those represent only three of the indicators a person could not be able to afford all three of them and still not count as materially deprived.

Whilst the Mail and Douglas Carswell seem to think that this is too much for anyone to have, the majority of people disagree. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into what people believe should be the minimum that a family need to get by, for an “adequate” life, found that people said that more than just these few items were needed.

Other problems include: equating out-of-work with workshy thereby ignoring disabled people and single mothers who aren’t able to find work easily (as the Government’s new benefit cap does); that nowhere do the statistics show which people are “playing the system” or have chosen welfare as a “lifestyle choice”; and that many welfare systems in Europe are far more generous than ours.

If anything it should be celebrated that our welfare state lifts people out of the worst of poverty in many cases - but sadly welfare is not as effective as the Daily Mail claims.

Climate Change in Bangladesh

Every Wednesday morning the members of the Joint Public Issues Team gather together for a team meeting, to plan, learn, reflect and decide. Sometimes we are joined by guests who can help us in our thinking and understanding.

Today we were joined by Joyanta Adhikari, a Baptist from Bangladesh, who was visiting the UK as part of a visit to support Commitment for Life, the URC’s partner with Christian Aid.  He was also invited to speak at a meeting at the Church of England General Synod at which the Archbishop of Canterbury was present. 

Mr Adhikari also is the Executive Director of Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) as well as the President of the National Council of Churches Bangladesh.

He spoke about the impact that the visible changes in Bangladesh’s climate are having on its population.

Seawater now comes 100 miles inland, as opposed to the 20 miles of a few years ago. The “saline intrusion” of the soil means that land is less fertile.

The length of the winter season has shortened to just two months and there has been an increase in the number and intensity of cyclones.

If the sea level was to rise by just 1.5m 16% of the total land of Bangladesh would be underwater, and 17 million people would have to move from the southern part of the country, adding to the number of people already displaced by the impact of climate change.

CCDB is supporting a variety of adaptation ideas which will help people to survive, such as the development of saline and drought resistant crops. The government, however, is often attracted to the large scale construction projects, such as building embankments, rather than the small scale piecemeal adaptation measures which will directly, and quickly, improve people’s livelihoods.

Mr Adhikari said that climate change is a justice issue because it is the poor who are being most affected, and who are losing their lives and livelihoods today.

As we approach the season of Lent, when we reflect on what we need to take up or put down in our lives, I will be challenged by Joyanta Adhikari’s words: “In the beautiful world that God has given us, there is enough to meet our need, but not our greed”.

The Welfare Reform Bill and the abuse of privilege

The dream of a generation of Christian social reformers has been dealt a terrible blow: their simple dream was that all who contributed to society would receive at least what they needed. Yesterday, the House of Commons voted to change that principle to “all that all who contribute will receive what they need – unless it is a lot”.  

There was no mention that families assessed to need a lot, might simply have a lot of needs. Although we were repeatedly told that many people raise families on less than £500 a week, there was no mention of the hundreds of thousands of families who because of their particular and difficult circumstances just can’t. Sadly there is polling evidence to say these families don’t vote and it is popular to pretend they don’t exist.

During the debate jargon phrases like “welfare dependant” were sometimes used to hide the raw contempt of sections of society – but sometimes not even these masks were used. It is an uncomfortable fact but the people in the room, particularly the most powerful ones, were drawn from a very different section of society to the people they were discussing. I would not go down to job centre and expect clients to give me an accurate description of life at Parliament. Sadly today we saw that this lack of understanding goes both ways.

The Government invoked “financial privilege” to prevent further debate on important changes to the Welfare Reform Bill. Essentially the Government said only the Commons can spend money, so any House of Lords amendment which might cost money can be waived away and told never to come back.

The awful truth is that the benefit cap is essentially a financially neutral measure done on the basis of principle and ideology – as the minister Lord Freud said repeatedly. This isn’t primarily a financial measure. If the Lords can’t discuss principle, ideology, money... why are they there? A question the Lords themselves asked repeatedly when they stopped debating the Healthcare Bill and repeatedly asked the government representative if there was any point continuing.

Financial privilege is a rule from 1671 and the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne. It was Parliament’s way of saying Charles II you can’t do what your father did – spend money on an extravagant lifestyle and expect us to raise taxes to pay for it - that is how Civil Wars start. Today it was used to say to the House of Lords you can’t talk about the lifestyles of 220,000 impoverished children, cancer suffers or people with disability. It was the worst example of a lack of respect and self-interested rule bending I heard all day.

Welfare Reform Bill - You Can Act!

Tomorrow the Welfare Reform Bill will be debated and voted on in the House of Commons. The Government are seeking to overturn the amendments passed in the Lords. As I write another amendment protecting disabled children has just been passed in the Lords against the Government's will.

The principle that all who play by the rules should receive enough to meet their basic needs has been at the heart of the welfare system for 65 years; if the benefit cap becomes law that principle will be destroyed. Only families whose basic needs are less than £26,000 will be safe. The rare and extremely vulnerable families who have greater needs will be left behind

The principle is wrong and the best predictions are that the effects will be equally wrong.The government’s proposed benefit cap will hit many of the most vulnerable people in society. It will affect 220,000 children (75% of those affected) and 14,740 families where Employment and Support Allowance (a disability benefit) is the main household income. It threatens to make over 80,000 children homeless and will push 133,000 children into poverty or further into poverty.

 

The Bishops amendment, carried in the House of Lords removes Child Benefit from the calculation. The effect would be to remove most of the families with children from the cap. The amendment was supported by children's charities, churches, faith groups , no-faith groups and many others because injustice of impoverishing children because of an arbitrary limit is obvious and painful.

The Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, and United Reformed Churches jointly wrote to every MP, explaining their objection to the principle of the Benefit Cap and urging them not to overturn the Bishop's amendment in tomorrows debate.

If you wish to contact your MP to express your concerns about the Welfare Reform Bill press the Church Action on Poverty button below. The emailer link will ask for your email address (for replies) and  your street address (to find your MP). It will then offer you a draft email which you can edit or accept as is before sending it to your MP with one more click.

Click to Email Your MP

Useful Links:

• The idea of a benefit cap is initially appealing to some. Many within churches - even former Archbishops - have supported it. 
• Go here for a simple explanation of why the Churches have said that the principle of a Cap is flawed:
• Today's Press statement of the Baptist, Methodist, Quaker and United Reformed Churches is here:
• You can read the letter that was sent to MPs here.

Taking a sober look at the facts around alcohol

One of the most interesting things about alcohol is that British people apparently find it hard to talk about it calmly and rationally, even when they are stone cold sober!
 

Over the last 30 years, alcohol has became steadily more affordable: price rises have consistently failed to keep pace with wage increases and Governments have kept alcohol taxes artificially low compared to other sources of revenue. As affordability has increased, so has consumption. And – hardly surprisingly – as consumption has increased, so has the harm caused by alcohol. Alongside this Government incentive to consumption, alcohol has also become more available and more heavily marketed; the alcohol content in available drinks has also increased and much larger wine glasses have become the norm. These are changes that many of us have seen in our lifetimes. In 2010, in England alone, there were over 1 million alcohol-related hospital admissions for the first time, and harms associated with problem drinking continue to rise.

A recent poll commissioned by the Methodist Church and its partners found that 61% of adult respondents in the UK felt there was a problem with excessive drinking in their neighbourhood. But public disorder, violence and other visible effects of alcohol misuse are not just issues of morality and enforcement; above all, they are medical issues to be considered alongside liver and heart disease.The simple fact is alcohol is a legal and socially acceptable drug which can cause dangerous long-term effects both on the body and people's behaviour. It is essential that all alcohol policy should be informed by medical research.

Studies such as the University of Sheffield’s landmark 2008 research (see e.g. http://www.shef.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.95621!/file/PartB.pdf) have shown that a minimum price per unit of alcohol of between 40p and 50p would reduce health harms, public disorder, alcoholism and sick days, saving lives and millions of pounds in costs to the NHS and Police. As noted by Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs,(see http://www.qaad.org/wp-content/press-releases/alcohol-briefing-june-2011.pdf), per unit minimum pricing has been recommended by the Chief Medical Officer (2009), the Royal College of Physicians, the British Medical Association (2008), the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE, 2010), the all-party Parliamentary Committee on Alcohol (2010), and Alcohol Concern. Churches (including the Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches) and charities have backed this call and David Cameron announced support for the per unit minimum price at the end of 2011, although there is significant opposition within the Coalition Government.

Objectively, the key question is whether setting a minimum unit price is illegal under European competition law. This remains to be established: there are grounds for believing that the health argument may take legal precedence. However there is a less rational criticism of minimum pricing that keeps emerging. People take queries about their alcohol consumption personally as a moral criticism saying, in essence, “who are you to tell me how much to drink; I know my limits”. Yet doctors routinely deal with people in their 20s or 30s who have effectively destroyed their livers or even brain function through excessive drinking without showing the clichéd signs of alcoholism.

Another illusory claim is that if the British had a continental drinking culture like, for example, the French, we would not exhibit the worst kinds of binge-drinking. Until around 30 years ago, Britain was essentially at the bottom of alcohol harms in Europe and liver disease and other alcohol-related conditions were high. During the same time period that drinking culture caught on the UK, France started to reconsider its drinking culture, and harms have fallen.

10 years ago, even to question the role of alcohol in society was to risk being accused of being a weirdo or even worse, religious! Now many voices are saying our drink culture has gone too far, even if many of these voices think it is only ‘other people’ who are in danger. 

It is time consider the similarities between the present time and the 19^th and early 20^th Century heyday of the Temperance movement. Then as now, alcohol (like gambling) is an activity whose abuse disproportionately harms the poorest and most vulnerable. Concern for social justice means challenging policies which exploit the vulnerable. 

Maybe instead of a new Temperance-style movement, based on the negative command to abstain from alcohol, Churches can offer a positive vision of life in community. Hard as it is to believe nowadays, Christians were once known for their radical joy. There may be nothing wrong with spirits in moderation, but isn’t a society that becomes reliant on chemical props one that has lost touch with the Spirit?

Solar PV feed in tariffs – a new bonanza until 3 March?

The management of the feed in tariffs by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has been shoddy. DECC have set aside a budget over four years that is now just a shade over £1 billion to fund the feed in tariff. That budget is now 75% committed after less than a year into the budget period. Faced with a budget crisis, DECC attempted to slam the doors shut on the now generous tariffs by announcing that installations installed after 12 December 2011 will be eligible for only 21 pence per kWh. The High Court ruled that this move (without consultation or Parliamentary approval) was illegal and that ruling was upheld on Wednesday by the Court of Appeal.

solar-energy.co.uk

It was always anticipated that an increase in demand for Solar PV in the UK would lead to falling costs of installation. This has proved to be the case with the cost of systems falling by 30% since feed in tariff were introduced. The feed in tariff originally set at 43 pence per kWh now looks over generous. This is nice for those of us (such as myself) who are fortunate enough to be able to scrape together the capital cost of a small system. But it also means that companies offering so-called ‘rent a roof’ schemes can make a killing. (With a rent a roof scheme you get your system for free offering you some saving on your electricity bill but the installers capture the feed in tariff income).

Following this week’s ruling it seems likely (unless DECC are successful in their appeal to the Supreme Court) that if you get a solar power system installed on your roof before the 3 March 2012, you (or future occupiers of your property) will benefit from an income of 43 pence per kWh for the next 25 years. Any churches that had been considering putting panels on their clergy houses and have ready cash available have a fleeting second chance to invest at a particularly attractive rate, contributing to our care for creation and establishing a small income stream for mission.

So, given the current mess, what should DECC be doing with solar PV and feed in tariffs? Germany has implemented a similar scheme and expects to provide a whopping 10% of their energy needs from solar by 2020. Electricity is a high value form of energy and solar panels generate electricity during the peak hours of demand. With the right incentives even cash-strapped local councils will install PV solar on social housing enabling council house tennants to save on fuel bills.  With rising oil prices and cost of PV panels bound to fall further, solar makes sense.

What we clearly haven’t got right yet is the incentive pricing and the mechanisms for adjusting tariffs. So how about this as a way forward: -

1. In addition to a budget over the Comprehensive Spending Review period lets also work out indicative costings for feed in tariffs for solar and other renewables over 10 years

2. Agree in advance the cut off dates for future tariff adjustments so that church and other community solar PV schemes can plan accordingly

3. Publish the general criteria that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change will use in determining the tariff for the next tariff period. This will provide those planning larger community schemes (for example on social housing) with some confidence in the government’s commitment to sustain tariff arrangements.

(See our joint churches response to the DECC consultation on feed in tariffs)

Faith leaders ask for the government to protect children.

The Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches signed the following letter calling for the household benefit cap to exclude child benefit:

As leaders of faith communities, we are often the first to see the impact of changes in Government policy as it impacts our congregations and the communities in which we work. We are deeply concerned about the planned introduction of a cap on benefits which will be debated in the House of Lords on Monday 23^rd January.

Although targeted at promoting fairness between working and non-working households, evidence from The Children’s Society shows that the cap will principally affect children much more than adults - only one in 560 adults is affected, compared to around one in 60 children. As many as 80,000 children could be made homeless as a result of the cap as it currently stands.

We very much hope that the Government will accept the proposed amendment to reduce the disproportionate impact of the cap on children by removing child benefit from household income as measured against the cap.

Child benefit is a non means tested benefit paid to both non-working and working families, to support the costs of raising their children. The amendment works to ensure that it is preserved for some of the poorest families in the Country.

Signed by:

Reverend Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester
Reverend Peter Smith, Department for Christian Responsibility and Citizenship
Rabbi Laura Janner Klausner, Movement for Reform Judaism
Dilwar Hussain, President, Islamic Society of Britain
Rev Leo Osborn, President of the Methodist Conference
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, Assembly of Masorti Synagogues
Maulana Shahid Raza, Secretary General, MINAB (Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board)
Rev Dr Pat Took, President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain
Rabbi Danny Rich, Chief Executive Liberal Judaism
Fuad Nahdi, Senior Research Fellow, Muslim College, London
The Revd Dr Kirsty Thorpe, Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church
Sayed Mohammed Al-Musawi, President of World Ahlul Bayt (as) Islamic League,

The original letter can be found on the Sunday Times website: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/regulars/lettersandemails/article860414.ece