Hello, and welcome to more or less. I've used the programme budget to buy a new motor home which I've assured our editor is purely so we can broadcast wherever we want around the country. We'll see how that one pans out. In the meantime, let's get going. This week we examine the moron premium in the bond market. Or in plain language, why does it cost the government so much to borrow money, and who should we blame? In a Welsh double bill, we answer a long-standing question about how many football pitches it would take to cover Wales, and more seriously, what does the evidence suggest about reading standards in Welsh schools? But first, last week, newsstands across the country featured this arresting headline from the Daily Express. Migrants will get half of all new homes. Loyal listeners got in touch to ask us to investigate, so our reporter Nathan Gower has been looking into this. The headline is pretty arresting, but don't stop there. When you actually read the story, it's talking about something quite different. How so? So that headline sounds to me at least like half of the new homes that are being built are earmarked to go to migrants. Agreed, it does sound like that. But that's not what's going on at all. There's nothing in the story about new housing being assigned to migrants. So what is the story actually about? It's based on an analysis made by the Conservative Party. I wanted to know how they came up with their figures, so last Wednesday, I called them up and they told me to send them an email. And what was their reply? Well, they didn't reply, so the next day, I sent another email. Did you get a reply to that? Nope, but I called again and they said they had seen the email and would get back to me. Did they? I've emailed them every day since then and had no reply. Surely not every day? Every day, including Sunday. Did there ever come a point, Nathan, when you decided you were going to get off email and do the work yourself? Yeah, Monday morning. OK, here goes. First, the Conservatives take government figures on the number of new homes that have been built in England since the Labour Party came to power in July 2024. That's about 275,000 homes. Then, they take figures for net migration since Labour came to power. Basically, the addition to the population due to migration. They say that's about 310,000. That seems to be their own estimate, by the way. This figure isn't actually officially published. Then, they try to work out how many homes these immigrants would be expected to occupy. They assume it would be 2.36 immigrants per home. That's the average national household size. So, this would equate to immigrants occupying about 130,000 homes. 130,000 is, of course, just under half of 275,000. Hence, the half claim. So, from what you're saying, this whole story isn't about future houses or future migration. It's about homes that have already been built and migration that's already happened. Correct. But, even more importantly, there's nothing here about half of these homes being either occupied by or reserved for new migrants. Also, these aren't all social housing where councils make decisions about who gets them, only a small fraction up. So, basically, if migrants wanted to live in one of these houses, in the vast majority of cases, they'd have to compete for them on the open market, alongside people already in the UK. That's despite what the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, is quoted as saying in the article. This is what uncontrolled immigration looks like. Nearly half of all homes Labour delivers vanish before a British family gets a look in. That's very odd. He's making it sound like the government is building the homes, which it isn't, and has made a list of who gets them, which it hasn't, and it's decided to house all migrants in them, which again, it hasn't. Quite. But more immigration is going to have an effect on housing. I spoke to Dr Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. Obviously, when the population is bigger, there are more people competing for housing in the UK. Migration has been the main driver of population growth in recent years. 99% of UK population growth, in fact, came from international migration between June 2020 and 2024. Now, of course, the context is really important here in that if more houses are being built, then migration will have a smaller impact on housing competition. And if fewer houses are being built, then migration will have a bigger impact on housing competition. But either way, it's still going to be more than in an alternative world when that migration was zero and didn't increase the population. So the Conservatives are criticising labour because a hefty increase in immigration has eaten into the extra housing supply added since it came to power. Nathan, what were the numbers like in the Conservative years? Let's start with house building. So in the last parliament, under the Conservatives, they added between roughly 220,000 and 235,000 homes a year. That's marginally higher than the most recent annual figure, most of which was under labour. But under the Conservatives, the housing levels were much, much higher. For example, in the last parliament, net migration peaked at 944,000 in 2022-23. For labour, the most recent annual figure is 171,000. Ben Brindle again. During labour's time in office, the housing supply has increased by more than the population has increased due to migration. But when you look at the Conservatives' time in office... That wasn't the case. And so the population increased more during the Conservatives' time in office and under this calculation, that picture would look worse under them than it does under labour. How much worse? Using the same logic and the same occupancy rate as the Conservatives did, for the last four financial years from 2020-24, more than 100% of the new supply of homes in the last Conservative parliament would have vanished due to demand from immigration. It seems a bit cheeky for the Conservatives to criticise labour for something that was worse under the last Conservative government. You might say that. James Riding is living market and sustainability editor at the magazine Inside Housing. He thinks that to imply that half of all new-build homes are going to immigrants is disingenuous. But... It would also be a little bit disingenuous to pretend that migration has no effect whatsoever on housing demand. Clearly more people does increase competition for homes. Likewise, I think it is really important to point out that governments have failed over many decades to build the new homes that we need while continuing to run high rates of immigration. So to point those two things out is actually very fair and important. But to equate the two and say that half of all the new-build homes that we're building are going straight to recent immigrants is just preposterous, really. Did the Conservatives get back to you? So I got in touch with them, putting these points to them, but I didn't get a response. Thank you, Nathan, and thanks to Ben Brindle and James Riding. Loyalist Patrick got in touch to ask about a claim he heard made by the journalist James Heal on Radio 4's Week in Westminster a few weeks ago. One in five Welsh children are leaving school functionally illiterate. So is that true? And what does it mean to be functionally illiterate? To find out, we spoke to Kathy Rastall, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of London. So our loyal listeners have been asking about functional illiteracy in Wales and the claim that one in five Welsh children are leaving school functionally illiterate. So that claim, do you know where it comes from? Well, it seems to have come from a series of reports by the Welsh schools regulator. These reports were around 15 years old, but they don't contain much actual data. So in addition to being quite old, we don't know what was measured. We don't know how the children were sampled. We don't know who they were compared against. So I wouldn't put too much faith in that particular claim. The claim is about children leaving school. When I hear that, I have in mind 18 year olds. But is this secondary school leavers or primary school leavers? I think that they were talking at that stage around children entering secondary school. But again, they don't say much about how they derived that claim. And the term functional illiteracy, one of those terms that you kind of feel like, you know what it must mean. And then when you think about it, you realize, actually, I've got no idea what it means. What does it mean? Well, we don't usually say functional illiteracy. So reading skills are on a continuum. Some children, particularly in low income countries, most children don't learn to read at all. So they would be illiterate. But then beyond that, in this country, we teach children to read. And they have a range of proficiency levels. Some of them can barely read at all. Some of them are quite good at reading. And we talk about functional literacy as the literacy skills that you need to get on in life. So to participate in society, to enjoy gainful employment, tasks like reading your payslip, reading the instructions on a medicine bottle, perhaps applying for a job online. So that would be functional literacy. So if a child doesn't have functional literacy, then they'd be unable to do those tasks. Right. So presumably functional literacy is related to what kind of society you live in. Exactly. So if I am a farmer in rural India, my need for reading skills is going to be much different than if I'm a school leaver in England. Right. OK, so let's leave this 15-year-old, maybe not terribly helpful, report behind. What do we know that is more credible and more recent about Welsh primary school leavers and their ability to read? Well, there's a very good assessment called the PISA. It stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. Now, this is an assessment on reading comprehension, amongst other things, that's conducted when children are 15 years old. It's conducted about every three years and around 80 nations participate. And the thing about PISA is that it has very high technical standards, strong sampling protocols, rigorous translation processes. And what that means is that we can compare scores from year to year over time and we can also compare scores across nations. What we know about Wales is that they did very poorly indeed in the 2022 exercise. So their average performance in reading was significantly below the OECD average and it was well below the England average, reflecting several months of schooling. And in fact, Wales's reading scores are now lower than almost any time in the PISA cycle across the last 20 years. Interesting. So you said that the average performance of Welsh 15-year-olds was poor in 2022. And what else did we learn from that round of PISA exams? Well, in addition to the average performance, you can also look at the distribution of the data and that's what's very concerning. So in PISA, we have six proficiency levels. And these proficiency levels are a way of mapping the score onto descriptions of reading ability that corresponds to different levels of understanding of a text. And in PISA, we think of level two as the baseline to get on in society. So that would be the functional literacy standard. Now, critically, in Wales in 2022, 29% of children fell below that level two standard. So 29% of 15-year-olds have a reading ability that is not sufficient to get on in society. And we can compare that to the OECD average of 26% and the England average of 20%. So in fact, the PISA data suggests a picture that's even worse than the initial claim came with. Yeah, that is not how I expected this conversation to go. You were telling me, oh, the claim is out of date. The claim is maybe not super helpful, doesn't have that much evidence. It's a bit unclear what they were saying. And now you're telling me, we do have actually much better, much more recent data and it's worse. Exactly. So that particular claim was very old. It's not based on great data, but we do have very strong data. That's recent. That suggests that Wales is in a really dark place as far as children's reading is concerned. Do we know why? We do know why. A report by the IFS, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, looked into what the reasons might be. They concluded that it's not due to something like poverty. So for example, disadvantaged children in England scored around 30 points higher than in Wales. It's also not due to something like education spending. And they determined that it's most likely due to certain policies and approaches. And they mentioned, for example, the less use of data. And what I would add is that Wales hasn't yet adopted evidence-based reading instruction in contrast to England, which adopted it almost 20 years ago. So you would say that basically the techniques being used in Welsh schools are not the best that the academic literature and the evidence recommends. Exactly. So we know from 35 years of cognitive psychology about how children learn to read and how they should best be taught. And one of the first stages of learning to read is learning to understand how the alphabet works, how the alphabet represents language. And the way that we do that is through explicit phonics instruction. Now, that was brought in in England around 20 years ago. And there's been a whole series of policies that have made that really work. So it's just a shame that that hasn't occurred yet in Wales. Our thanks to Kathy Rastle. We asked the Welsh government, now run by Plaid Cymru, after their recent election victory, for their response on literacy rates. They told us that the literacy policy was produced by the previous administration and that they would be introducing evidence-based approaches, including phonics, to raise standards in schools. You're listening to more or less. A gentle reminder that we have hundreds of programmes in our back catalogue available on BBC Sounds. You can listen back to our special Stats of the Nation series. Or maybe you just want to find out whether grizzly bears really eat 250,000 berries a day. All these riches await. With the Labour Party in a spin over local elections and a potential leadership race, less sympathetic parts of the press have been warning of bond market disaster coming down the tracks. UK battered by markets as labour chaos takes hold. Labour is steering Britain into a bond market meltdown. Do they have a point? Two weeks ago, at the height of the turmoil, the effective interest rate charged on new government borrowing for a 10-year term reached the highest level since 2008. This led some to compare it to the infamous spike in borrowing costs that followed Liz Truss's ill-fated mini-budget back in 2022. This was the extra interest that the UK suddenly found itself paying compared to other countries after the bond market reacted badly, which was memorably and unkindly dubbed the moron premium by one financial analyst. But for one Labour politician, the shadow of Liz Truss was present in a different way. Peter Keil, the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, argued that we were still paying the price for her 2022 mini-budget nearly four years on. The high borrowing costs of Britain stem back to the mini-budget and the Liz Truss experiment that blew a hole in our finances, and it is very hard once a country lets loose of our finances in the way that they did then to get a grip back on our reputation around the world. So who's right? Are we still paying a moron premium caused by Liz Truss's mini-budget? Has Labour created its own moron premium through unwise policies or simply their political infighting? Or could there be another explanation that doesn't involve morons at all? To find out, we spoke to friend of the show, economist and author Duncan Weldon. I started by asking him to take us back to that moment in 2022. Okay, so if we go back to the short-lived Liz Truss Premiership, I think it's important to bear in mind the global context at the time. In the summer and the autumn of 2022, the world was still recovering from the pandemic. Russia had invaded Ukraine that February, and there was a lot of inflation about both energy price inflation coming out of the Russia-Ukraine war, and general inflation as the economy around the world came out of lockdowns. And into that environment of rising global inflation and rising global interest rates, the Truss government decided to have the biggest set of tax cuts in three or four decades, depending on how you count it, to increase borrowing by about £30 billion to cut taxes. And this was sort of kryptonite to the market for British government debt. It was going to push inflation higher, which bonds don't like. It was increasing borrowing, and so we saw quite a large increase in the yield, the interest rate on British government debt. And then something else happened. As interest rates on British government debt rose, for various technical reasons, sort of specific to that market, lots of pension funds, who were big investors in this area, were forced to sell. And as they sold, interest rates went higher, forcing more pension funds to sell. This was an investment technique called liability-driven investment. It involved an awful lot of borrowing. It was quite murky. It took a lot of people, including the authorities, and including quite a few pension funds, by surprise. And so on top of sort of the fundamental dynamics of we already had high inflation, we had a government doing things which looked like it would increase inflation more, we also had this sort of technical factor, which meant the sell-off in British government debt was much faster than anyone expected. Right. So there's a sort of self-reinforcing spiral to do with crunch points in the financial system. Yes. In the days after the mini-budget was unveiled, the interest rate on long-term UK bonds jumped from about 3.7% to 4.7%. That may not sound like a big change, but trust us, it's massive. Research from the Bank of England later concluded that about a third of that jump was attributable to bond investors' initial reaction to the mini-budget. The remaining two-thirds was caused by the whole system spiralling out of control. The crisis was acute and intense, but as trust's government reversed most of the mini-budget and the Bank of England bought tens of billions of bonds to prop up the market, things calmed down. The crisis had passed. It didn't last very long. So, you know, the sell-off in British government debt began in September, around the time of the so-called mini-budget, and by the middle of October, normality was being restored. And of course, there'd been a lot of policy change, lots of that budget. The policy was reversed. The policy, yeah. Much of the policy was reversed. So, did the Liz Trust mini-budget have lasting effects? I think the experience of 2022, and that sort of bond market blow-up we had, even if it only lasted a month, coloured how a lot of international investors think about the UK. And I think they are constantly aware of they've been burned in this shock in 2022, and they are very cautious that that sort of thing could happen again. Certainly, something seems to have changed in the autumn of 2022. Before it, we were about middle of the pack for borrowing costs with our G7 peers. But over time, we've climbed higher, and now we pay the highest rates. So, is the trust moment to blame for the worsening situation? I think 2022 was an important catalyst in that, but I think it's a broader picture. You've had years of low growth in the British economy. We've seen these kind of international energy price shocks, much the UK is very exposed to, and they seem to keep on happening. And then you've had an awful lot of political instability, as well, of which 2022 is one extreme example, but we have gone through Prime Ministers and Chancellors very quickly. And yet the broad point is, 10 years ago, we were middle of the pack for government borrowing costs, and now amongst the advanced economies, we pay more than many peers. But when I think about what Peter Kyle said, he basically phrased it entirely in terms of reputation. Liz Truss lost her grip on the finances, and we lost our reputation, and it's hard to get it back. But from what you just said, maybe that's part of it, but there's a lot of other things going on. Yeah, I mean, look, that's part of it. And that sort of blow up in 2022 was an important catalyst, but it's not the whole story. And I'm afraid the government can't just blame something that happened under the previous government for the position we were in, almost four years later. The Liz Truss episode hasn't been forgotten, but it doesn't explain all of the situation we're currently in. A 10-year UK government bond currently pays about 4.8%. That's increased by about half a percentage point in the last few months. So what does explain the rise? I think there's three factors at work there. There is a general rise in bond interest rates globally, particularly in the United States, and that has sort of a gravitational pull on interest rates in other countries. Everyone's paying more, so we're paying more. Exactly. You've obviously got what's happened in the Middle East. There's really big increase in the oil price, which pushes up expectations about inflation and therefore interest rates in Britain, and Britain is very exposed to that. And then on top of that, you have something the government doesn't really want to talk about, sort of a sprinkling of what markets might call political uncertainty. And just how big an effect might political uncertainty be having? A blog by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research released two weeks ago tried to answer this exact question. They did find that political instability was having an effect on bond yields. However, the premium they found was small. Global rates and oil prices have pushed borrowing costs up by many times more than any political shenanigans. Our thanks to Duncan Weldon, author of Blood and Treasure. And if you really want to get under the hood of how the bond market works and what drives those interest rates up and down, you can still listen to Duncan's documentary from last year. Just search for Of Budgets and Bond Markets on BBC Sounds. Here on More or Less, we are blessed with a constantly overflowing inbox, but torturously constrained by only 20 radio four episodes a year. So if it takes a while to get to some of your correspondence, we beg your pardon and your patience. The next email came to us in November 2025 from Jenny in Sweden. But I think we can all agree it's a timeless, more or less classic. I've learned from your show that the size of an area is generally measured in football fields or in the size of Wales. Recently, I watched the Ted Lasso series. I was astounded to learn in one of the episodes that football fields are not all the same size. My question is, what size football field is the standard definition used by more or less? And how many football fields in that size would be needed to cover an area the size of Wales? Who better to answer this than timeless and classic friend of more or less, Rob Eastaway, mathematician and author of Maths on the back of an envelope? First of all, not everything about a football pitch is variable. Some things are absolutely fixed. Every football pitch, adult football pitch in the world, has the same dimension in the penalty box. And did you know, here's a fun fact that the penalty spot is exactly 10.97 meters from the goal line. I mean, what a beautiful number, which is maybe making you think, why isn't it 11 meters? Like, what's that three centimeters all about? It feels something to do with Imperial, right? It is indeed. It's because it's 12 yards. 12 yards indeed. And there's of course, the six yard box and the 18 yard box. So everything on the football field is actually in yards. And the width of the penalty box is 44 yards, since I'm not a figure, but actually, there's an old measurement called the chain, which is 22 yards. It's two chains. It's two chains. So very handy for the groundsmen who's got a chain in 1900 to measure out. You say, oh, two of those. I'll go to the middle of the goal, put it round. That's our box. But come on, you've been dodging the question. The question is, how many football pitches to cover the size of Wales? And yes, the size of a football pitch is not entirely standard. Yes. Okay. And I'm going to go metric now, because that's the way the regulations seem to have gone these days. So the regulation for worldwide pitches is that they have to be between 90 and 120 meters long, which is quite a lot of variation. And nothing compared to width, which has to be between 45 and 90 meters wide. 90 meters wide. 45 is quite narrow. It's not much. We remember our penalty box is 44 yards, which is not, you know, 40 meters. Hang on. So I'm trying to, so you can have a football pitch that's, I mean, 120 times 90 is about 10,000 square meters. Correct. Or you can have one that's 90 by 45, which is about 4,000 square meters. So that's less than half. Yeah. That's a huge variance. And according to my source, the area of Wales is 21 billion square meters. So divide one by the other. I make it that the number of football pitches in Wales is somewhere between 5.2 and 1.9 million. Right. Two to five million football pitches. What's that between friends? For those of you who want a single answer, we could take the average size of a Premier League pitch, or even better, just take the size of the most perfect pitch in the world, which I am told is Loftus Road, the home of QPR. Okay. Either way, you end up with needing about three million football pitches to completely cover Wales, although some of them would be quite mountainous. Our thanks to friend of the program, Rob Easterway. And that's all we have time for, but please keep your questions and comments coming in to more or less at bbc.co.uk. We will be back, same time, same place next week. Until then, goodbye. So, we are now at the end of the first part of our first week of the season. We are now at the end of the first season of the season. We are now at the end of the first season. We are now at the end of the first season. We are now at the end of the first season. We are now at the end of the first season. We are now at the end of the first season. 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