On BBC Sounds, there are podcasts to help you look after your body and your mind from increasing your immunity to feeling more confident or tips on how to focus. Sorry, what were you saying? If it matters to you, it matters to us. Feel good inside and out with What's Up Docs and Complex with Kimblee Wilson. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, in 2003 Michael Blaston, a BBC radio producer and Andrew Dilnot, an economist, began work on a radio programme that would redefine the relationship between numbers and the news. In 2007 the reins were taken up by another economist, Tim Harford, who brought, wait, what am I doing? That's me! We're making a special series of More or Less this week. Onward! Today, in honour of dear Melvin Bragg, we're looking at education, at justice and at a deep analysis of the weird patterns in our weather. But in a completely unrelated item, let's get started with millionaire pensioners. One of the lovely things about having all these special programmes to fill is that we can tick off some of the questions that we keep getting asked about, despite the fact that we've definitely answered them before at some point. So this one's for you, Elizabeth, and you, John, and Linda, Toby, Donald, Mary, I could go on. The inbox bulging query in question revolves around a stat that has been banded around willy-nilly in newspaper columns and radio interviews for years now, that some large proportion of pensioners are millionaires. I'm keeping it vague because there are various numbers kicking around, but the most common appears to be 25%. So is this true? Are a quarter of pensioners millionaires? I am joined by Hady Kylianynen, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Welcome, Hady. Thanks very much. So is it true? Well, the Office for National Statistics releases wealth statistics for the UK. So if you look at the data from 2020 to 2022, they say that about 22% of over 65-year-olds live in a household with more than one million pounds of wealth. So this is where the number comes from. So that's closer to one in five than one in four. OK. And so it immediately raises questions. So we need to understand the definition of wealth. Also this question of live in a household. I mean, I can live in a household whether a million pounds floating around and doesn't mean that I get any of them. So what's going on there? Yeah, so that's exactly right. So this is based on how much wealth the household has. So say if you have a couple who have a million pounds between them, that would count as two millionaires. Whereas if we then define wealth as per-person wealth, so how much is the total household wealth divided by the number of people in the household? We find that actually 9% of over 65s live in a household that has wealth that's over one million pounds per person. And when we're saying that these pensioners are in millionaire households, does that include pension wealth? Does that include housing wealth? Like what counts as contributing to that million pounds? Well, that number includes all wealth. So it's financial wealth. So that's things like savings and investments. It's even physical wealth. But most importantly, it also includes pension and housing wealth. And those are by far the two kind of largest categories of wealth that UK households have. Now, of course, because of that definition, it's quite likely that many of these people who we define as millionaires wouldn't consider themselves as being as well off as what we might think a millionaire could expect. In particular, if you have a lot of housing wealth, that could be because you purchase a house, say in London or in the southeast of England in the 70s or 80s, and you've benefited from a lot of house price growth. But many of those people could be on relatively low incomes at the same time. When it comes to pension wealth, many people, especially in these generations of current pensioners have what we call defined benefit or final salary pension schemes. So what that means is that they get a guaranteed income every year from their pension until they die. And again, if you say get £20,000 from your pension per year, that means that you will be doing relatively well. But at the same time, you might not feel like you are actually particularly well off. But to get £20,000 a year, the implicit wealth that generates £20,000 a year is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yeah, exactly. So if you wanted to buy a product in the private market today, so you're age 65, you want a product that pays you £20,000 per year, that would cost you £370,000. But of course, someone who has this £20,000 per year coming in, they don't see that number. So they might not quite realise how valuable that guaranteed income until death is. One of the things that's going on is the government tried to cut winter fuel payments and then rode back on a lot of that. So at the time that this was a really hot political topic, and there was a lot said about the number of pensioners living in poverty in the UK. So just refresh our memories. What are the stats on pensioner poverty now look like? Yeah, so I think it's worth when we're talking about poverty to define what do we actually mean. So someone living in poverty, basically someone who has a household income that's less than 60% of the median household income across the whole population. Now the pensioner poverty rate in 2023 data was 16%. So 16% of pensioners based on this relative income poverty measure being in poverty. Interesting. Now how does that compare to the past? I want to know is this a bad or a good number? So basically in the early 1990s, that number was more like 40%. It's been huge progress. And even in the early 2000s, it was more like over one in four pensioners in relative income poverty. So 16% now for pensioner households. What about working-age households? So the working-age poverty rate is 19%. So it's a little bit higher. And there's been a lot of discussion around child poverty recently, so especially because the government announced that they're going to abolish the two child limits on benefits. And child poverty rate is actually 31%. So it's nearly double that pensioner poverty rate. A series of policies, many focused around the state pension, have led to substantial improvements in the incomes of older people. And since 2011, one key driver of that has been the triple lock on the state pension. The triple lock means that in each April, the value of the state pension increases in line with the highest of 2.5% average earnings growth or inflation. Now what that has done to the value of the state pension, so if we compare that to having had average earnings indexation since the 2010s, that's what the previous government had promised to do. The idea being that pensions keep place with earnings. Exactly. So if we compare that to that as the alternative reality, because of the triple lock, the value of the state pension is now £30 more per week than it would have been otherwise. So that's about 14% higher. Because of the way the triple lock is designed, the state pension never goes down relative to earnings, but it can and does ratchet up, particularly in times of economic volatility. Because society is aging, there are going to be more people taking a pension too. These costs are somewhat offset by increases in the state pension age, but not fully. What the triple lock has done is that it's basically added a lot more spending than what we expected. So the OBRs, again the Office for Budget Responsibility, they estimate that by the end of this parliament, again relative to average earnings indexation, the triple lock is going to cost us £15.5 billion more per year. So that basically tells you that where we've ended up in terms of spending is a lot higher than what we expected back in 2010. Thanks to Haydie Kylianan. Ah Finland, the land of saunas, mumins, Haydie Kylianan and an extraordinarily effective education system. For decades Finnish schools have been held up as a paragon of learning, with their lack of standardised testing, teacher autonomy and focus on equality in the classroom. But what if I was to tell you that in recent years the English education system, with its crowded classrooms, overstretched teachers and endless tests, was performing better than the Finnish one. That claim was made in a blog post last year and our sauna correspondent Tom Cole has been looking into it. So this story is all about the results from international school tests, the biggest of which is known as PISA. These are exams taken by a sample of mostly 15 year olds in countries around the world in maths, reading and science. They run by the OECD every three years. There are also other tests known as pearls and tims, which are run by someone else and taken at different ages. PISA tests started in the early 2000s and this is when Finland gained its magical aura. When the first PISA tests came out, Finland was right at the top. That's Harry Fletcher Wood, a former teacher who now works at professional development company StepLab and who wrote the blog analysis you mentioned at the start. Prior to the PISA tests there weren't amazing ways of comparing different countries with one another. So I think if you'd asked academics in the late 90s, which are the best countries in Europe, people wouldn't necessarily have pointed to Finland, which is why Finland then has this great status when it does come out on top. However, in the couple of decades since those high test scores, something interesting has happened. If you look at the international tests in reading and maths, England now exceeds Finland and that's in multiple different tests and different year groups, which yes, you wouldn't necessarily have expected 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, that is interesting. I mean, English schools don't feel like they have a world-beating aura, but I guess there are two possible reasons here. Is it that Finland has got worse or that England has got better? If you always got to be such a downer, Tim. But yes, the answer is a bit of both. Finnish results have fallen substantially. So if I look at PISA maths, 20 years ago they were on 548 and England was on 495 with a norm of 500. And today Finland is 8 points below England. In the latest results from tests in 2022, England scored 492 and Finland 484. Wait, the England score went down? Yes, these tests were hit by the Covid pandemic across the board, but the fall in the English results was smaller than the fall elsewhere. I should say Finland is still ahead on science. Still on maths and reading, Harry says the English data is going the right way. So if you look at England compared to the OECD averages, if you go back 20 years, England was around the OECD average. If you look now, we are substantially above the OECD average. And I'm optimistic that when the next set of tests come round in three, four years time, we will see England back on that improvement trajectory. And you keep talking about England. What about the other nations? Yeah, here's Harry again. Sadly for England, but sadly for everyone else, where England was roughly level pegging with the other home nations 20 years ago, we do now exceed Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland in pretty much everything. So a good news story about English education, although not the other nations, but what about the data? Does it hold up these conclusions? Well, everyone I spoke to on this story told me there was one man who was the go-to guy on pizza testing. Good to hear. My name is Professor John Gerrim and I'm a Professor of Education and Social Statistics at UCL. Yeah, so there's a number of kind of methodological difficulties with comparing across countries and over time. And some of these things are particularly difficult in the English context. Right. For example? Well, first, the schools are based on taking a representative sample of schools in each country. And some schools don't agree to take part. And then for each school, they can exclude some pupils from the assessment. Now one of the problems with England is we seem to have higher rates of non-response than in many other countries, which makes the comparison a little more tricky, right, in terms of is the sample truly representative or not? Then you have the problem of timing. The UK moved its tests later in the year, roughly from spring to autumn. So kids had more time to learn. Which also changes the characteristics of who we've been testing as well. And when COVID hit, they moved the tests later still compared to other countries. So we had a bit more time for children to kind of recover from the effect of that pandemic. And to some extent we're seeing that kind of wash out in the test scores as well. It sounds like we shouldn't trust these test scores at all. Not so fast. I should be clear. Harry recognises all of these issues but still thinks it's a useful measure. And John basically agrees as long as you're careful with how you use it. What we need to be doing is looking for broad patterns and broad trends over time that seems to hold across multiple sources of data. I do believe that actually relative to other countries we've probably been doing reasonably well. We shouldn't over exaggerate how well it's been going on. We're talking about kind of, you know, probably a little trickle-upwards rather than kind of giant leap forwards. Great. OK, so the education system in England does seem to have improved at these kinds of tests. Who gets the credit for that? Well, new labour invested in education. They introduced the phonics method of teaching reading and they started academy schools. Then the Conservative-led government brought in a range of reforms to the education system in England with a view on improving standards. When asked in 2015 how they had measured whether those improvements worked, given that they were also changing much of the examination system so there wouldn't be a clear baseline, Education Secretary Nikki Morgan said that you should judge them on international tests like PISA. So, she said, judge us by PISA and then 10 years later the PISA scores have improved, relative to other countries at least. Yeah. I should probably say before the emails that there's loads more to say about the education system like about school absences, which have been a persistent problem since the pandemic. And the big increase in the number of kids with special educational needs. But the bell's about to go and I really want a sausage roll. Fair enough. Class dismissed. Can I leave this sauna now? No. Here on more or less we're a bit like a busy kitchen. We've got a juicy story about NHS waiting times, sizzling away in the oven. Lizzie is whipping up a light and frothy cat item and there's a good 10 minutes on quantitative tightening slowly fading away at the back of the cupboard. But we've also got our slow simmer stories, those we've put on the back burner to check in on from time to time because sometimes they boil over. One of the biggest stories of the summer of 2024, shortly after the Labour government came to power, was the prisons crisis as the numbers of those incarcerated threatened to hit the system's maximum capacity. This led the Labour government, like the Conservative government before it, to undertake emergency measures including the early release of some prisoners. Since then, as it came off boiling point, the story faded from the headlines. We wanted to lift the lid and have a good stir. So we spoke to Cassia Rowland, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government. I asked her to take us back to 2024 and the nature of the crisis. It was about 87,500 people in prison then and capacity was about 88,000, 89,000. So it was really fine and then over the summer it got even worse because we had the riots and the kind of unrest over that summer and that meant that we had under 100 spaces left in adult men's prisons in August of 2024. So the new government came in and they knew before the election that it was going to be bad, I think even so, they were quite alarmed by just how bad it was. So what did they do? So they announced very quickly that they were going to be implementing this policy called SDS 40. Now basically what that means is that most prisoners, instead of being released after serving half of their sentence in prison, are released after 40% of their sentence. It didn't apply to everyone. There were some exceptions around sexual offenders and very serious violent offenders, things like that. Early release for some prisoners. Exactly. SDS 40. SDS 40. Worst boyband ever. Right. OK. Did that work? It did work, but not for very long, I think is the fair assessment. So it successfully got quite a lot of people out of prison, but the prison population started rising again pretty quickly. So what is the capacity margin now? So there's about 2,200 spaces left across all prisons and in men's prisons specifically, it's just under 2,000. So much more than it used to be, but still very tight. Exactly. OK. So what is the prison capacity increased at all? It has a little bit. There was a new prison that opened in the spring and that got them another sort of 1,500 spaces, something like that. And they really needed that. That's the only reason that we haven't found ourselves back at crisis point again. So why is the prison population still rising? There's a long term story here about decades of stricter sentencing laws leading to the most serious offenders spending more time in prison, and that's steadily increased the prison population over time. But there's something more immediate going on as well, particularly with prisoners on remand. So these are people who have been charged with an offence and are waiting for their trial or they've been convicted of an offence and they're waiting to be sentenced. So either way, it's kind of they haven't yet been sentenced and know if they need to stay in prison and how long for. Yeah. So why is that rising? Because presumably such people always exist. The big problem there is in the criminal courts. So we've seen massive increases in the backlog in the crown court in particular, but also in magistrates courts that deal with less serious offenses. So how big is the backlog in the court system? The biggest problem is in the crown court, which deals with the most serious offenses. That's about 80,000 cases. But once you adjust for the fact that cases in the backlog are more complex than other kinds of cases, it's equivalent to about 100,000. And that's roughly a year's worth of work for the courts. Right. So if nobody was accused of a crime at all from now on, just wait a year and the entire backlog would have been cleared. Pretty much. That's a big backlog. It is a big backlog. And it is getting worse basically every month and is probably going to keep getting worse for at least the next few years. In December, the Justice Secretary, David Lamme, announced plans to deal with the court backlog by removing the right to trial by jury for offenses which carry a sentence of up to three years in prison with the hope of speeding up trials. But this isn't expected to come into effect until 2028 at the earliest. And it's around 2028 that some new prisons are meant to be open for business, which would boost capacity. In the meantime, if it does nothing else, the prison population is currently projected to keep on increasing and to quickly exceed what the system can cope with. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the government is banking on another plan in the meantime. So the government has its sentencing bill, which is trying to deal with the demand side rather than the capacity supply side. And that is going through Parliament at the moment. One of the big changes that makes is it will reduce the minimum period of time that people have to spend in prison even further. So those people who used to be released after 50% of their sentence now released after 40% could potentially be released after just a third of their sentence subject to good behavior. Yeah. There are some risks with that. One of them obviously is good behavior. Things in prisons are pretty terrible at the moment. We've got sky high levels of violence, really high rates of protesting behaviors, which is things like barricading parts of the prison. Drug use is really high. Access to activity like education, employment is really low and getting worse. Our thanks to Cassia Rowland from the Institute for Government. We will of course keep our eye on this and all our other slow simmer items. In the meantime, on with today's four course menu. On this special series, Stats of the Nation, we've been discussing some of the UK's greatest statistical talking points. With this in mind, there's one topic we simply have to talk about. The one true topic us Brits are interested in. The one topic that rules us all. The topic that unites us. The topic that calls to us all. And then mutual fascination binds us. Yes, it's the weather. Like the news, it changes every day. Unless it's February, then it's just grey. But recently the weather has seemed to be even more changeable than usual. Actually, more than changeable, downright weird. Droughts in summer, suspiciously mild winters and soggy soggy springs. Is it climate change? Or is it like my stint as a K-pop backing dancer or just a phase? To find out, we sat down with Freddie Otto. She's professor of climate science at Imperial College London and runs an initiative called World Weather Attribution to assess the role of climate change in extreme weather events. We started with a hot topic. How much the temperature has gone up in the UK since pre-industrial times? It's about 1.6 degrees. That's actually surprisingly hard to find out how much it has gone up since pre-industrial times because while the Met Office is producing the State of the UK climate report every year, they always give the numbers of how much the temperatures have gone up since the baseline between the 1960s and 1990s. Since the baseline between the 1960s and 1990s, it has gone up by 1.24 degrees in the UK. And how much of that is very recent, say the last 10 years since the Paris Agreement? In the last 10 years, it was a bit over 0.4 degrees and before that, the decades, it was on average 0.25 per decade. So is 1.24 degrees a significant increase then in terms of average temperatures even though day-to-day it seems trivial? Yes, it is a very significant number in terms of average temperatures. And I have to remember that this is not a number of daily temperature variability. It is the change in average and the change in average over a very long time and that means that we can have now summer days that are 4 or 5 or 6 degrees hotter than they would have been without climate change. And also, for example, for minimum temperatures, even the average is already much closer to 2 degrees. And that means that just the envelope of possible daily temperatures has moved quite dramatically. In the UK, we have a relatively high variability between year-to-year. So we have some colder years, some warmer years, some hot summers, some cooler summers naturally. So that means that we don't see quite so dramatic impacts yet. I am struck by the fact that the weather so often just seems to be a bit weird, a bit unsettling. And I'm trying to work out whether it's just because I'm aware of climate change and therefore I'm oversensitive. Am I imagining it? No, you're actually not imagining it. Basically, every time now it rains, it rains more than it would have without climate change. Every time we have a high pressure system, it gets warmer than it would have been without climate change. And that's true in the colder times of the year in the summer. And that means we actually see also, especially in parts of the world like Britain and the other sort of mid-letitudes, we see a stronger change from day to day in the weather that some colleagues actually do call global weirding. And there is a risk that this global weirding could become increasingly normal. Freddie and her team try to look at various weird and extreme weather events to calculate how much climate change affected them and how often the weirdness might be repeated. On a global average, we have higher temperatures. That also means on average we see more heat waves, fewer cold waves, and also a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and that needs to get out of the atmosphere and it does so as extreme rainfall. And so, for example, for UK winter storms, we see that the likelihood of extremely heavy rainfall has doubled. Or we can also look at the intensity, so how much rain do they bring, and we find there is about a 10% increase in the rain that winter storms now bring in the UK. Time to get a new umbrella. Our thanks to Professor Freddie Otto. And that's it for our penultimate episode of this special series. Tomorrow it's time for Desert Island Discs, so we'll obviously look at migration, but also run the numbers on benefits and inequality too. Please keep your questions and your comments coming in tomorrow at bbc.co.uk. Until tomorrow, goodbye. More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles with Nathan Gower, Charlotte MacDonald, Lizzie McNeill and Katie Soloveld. The programme was recorded by Sarah Hockley, and the series was mixed by James Beard, Neal Churchill and Sarah Hockley. The production coordinator was Maria O'Gunderley, and our editor is Richard Varden. Hello, I'm Amal Rajan, and from BBC Radio 4, this is Radical. We are living through one of those hinge moments in history when all the old certainties crumble and a new world struggles to be born. So the idea behind this podcast is to help you navigate it. What's really changed is the volume of information that has exploded. And also by offering a safe space for the radical ideas that our future demands. Go to the Chancellor and say cut, radically cut the taxes of those with children. Telling our stories is powerful and a radical act. Listen to Radical with Amal Rajan on BBC Sounds.
