Is it true that out-of-work benefits have almost doubled?

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Hello and welcome to More or Less.

We're the program that takes the er out of numbers.

Is that any better?

Doesn't that just leave nums?

Who writes these scripts?

Well, I read them and I'm Tim Harford.

And this week, we explore the idea that there's a class of people who really won the lottery of life.

And they are pensioners in France.

We look at the possibility that salmon are a sort of perpetual motion machine, except for food.

And if there's one number you can really be sure of, it is that there are five senses.

Hmm, hold that thought.

But first, unemployment and the benefit system are hot political potatoes at the moment, with a general sense that things are bad and getting worse.

There are lots of numbers flying around, and one that keeps reappearing is about the number of people who are claiming out-of-work benefits.

Here is that number, as laid out by one of the presenters of GB News, who also happens to be the leader of a political party that's topping the polls.

There are now six and a half million people, six and a half million people on jobless benefits.

Reform leader Nigel Farage went on to say: Unbelievably, those on out-of-work benefits that are made up of incapacity benefits, unemployment support, and universal credit.

Those numbers are up by 80% since 2018.

6.5 million people on out-of-work benefits and that number has nearly doubled in the last seven years.

Okay,

so is this true?

Or is it literally rather than rhetorically unbelievable?

Above all, does it mean what we think it means?

At this stage, we would turn to our public policy reporter, Kenny Badenock, except that we try to avoid employing the leaders of political parties as journalists here on the BBC, so instead let us turn to an expert, step forward Ben Baumberg Geiger, Professor of Social Sciences and Health at King's College London.

So there's two really important things to know in responding to what Nigel Farad said.

The first is that he's not gone out cherry-picking the data to do that.

The DWP are releasing data sets on out-of-work benefit claimants that seem to show that.

But the second point to know is that's probably totally misleading, because the way that that counting is happening is not at all consistent over time, in a way that quite plausibly means there's only been a very small rise in the proportion of people claiming out-of-work benefits.

So the number isn't wrong exactly.

It's the trend that's questionable.

And there's an obvious reason why.

With any numbers we're getting from administrative records, you always have the problem that they're not actually there to count things consistently, they're there to deliver something, in this case delivering payments to people.

These payments are made under a system that's changed a lot since 2013.

That was the year in which the Universal Credit System began to be rolled out, and it's still being rolled out now.

Universal credit is a single system which was designed to replace a range of different benefits, including job seekers allowance, housing benefit, child tax credits and various types of income support.

As the universal credit system takes over, the kind of claims that are being counted is changing.

Universal credit claims depend on how much you're working and earning, and you could be working part-time while still receiving out-of-work benefits.

And that's partly because the government has a cut-off of how much work you need to be doing in order to be count as working.

And that cutoff always changes over time as well.

So a certain number of people on out-of-work out-of-work benefits are, in fact, working.

They're just not doing enough hours or earning enough through it to be counted as out-of-work by the government.

So, does that change the number of people in receipt of benefits, or just the definition of the benefits they're receiving?

So, that just changes the category of whether they're counted as out-of-work or not.

So, universal credit is a benefit that covers people in work and out-of-work and replaces some out-of-work benefits before, but also tax credits, which were partly for people in work, but also for people out of work.

So the picture is pretty confusing going back and is also a bit confusing now, but people claiming benefits may be in work and may not be in work.

Does claiming universal credit mean you are receiving money?

Not necessarily.

So a certain number of people are on universal credit, but because of their other income in a particular month, they don't receive anything that month.

So some of the 6.5 million people receiving out-of-work benefits aren't receiving any money, and some of them are working.

But that's still not the real problem surrounding this number.

The difficulty is with the claim that it's increased by 80% over the past seven years.

If that was a real increase, it would be huge, surely unsustainable.

But if it's just a matter of changing definitions, maybe not.

And sometimes a policy change can save lots of money and dramatically reduce the number of people being given an income by the government, and yet increase the number of people on out-of-work benefits.

How can that be?

Ben has a particular example in mind.

The state pension age has been rising in recent years.

And this is something that saves the government money.

So rather than the 2.7 million women aged 60 to 64 and men and women age 65 who were getting the basic state pension before now we just have roughly 300,000 people claiming out-of-work benefits who would have been getting the pension before.

There's also the fact that the population has increased which you would normally take into account.

But for the big one we've got to go back to the gradual rollout of universal credit again.

The single biggest change which almost nobody really has got their head around is that before you could be getting money from the government while you were out of work on tax credits in particular, also housing benefit and some other things, but you are not classed as on an out-of-work benefit because you're not claiming unemployment benefit or incapacity benefit or single parent benefit and the various names those have had over the years.

Whereas under universal credit, you now are classified as that.

So that makes an enormous difference to the number of people.

These were people receiving money from the government before and people receiving money from the government now for very similar reasons.

But before, they didn't count as receiving out-of-work benefits and now they do.

These changes are adding up.

Plausibly, we're looking at well over a million people being counted on the out-of-work benefits claim numbers who wouldn't be counted as that before, even though for most of us their situation looks exactly the same.

What about looking at the money that's being spent rather than the number of claimants?

Does that give us a clearer or more consistent picture of what's happening to the trend?

Aaron Powell, the money being spent is easier to track over time, but again, people have been really misunderstanding what's been going on because

if your listeners have been paying attention to this, looking at things on the internet, in the newspapers, they may well have seen graphs showing that spending on health and disability related benefits is going up, which is true.

But what they won't have shown is that spending on other benefits for working-age people, and also to children because they're paid to working-age people who are their parents, spending on those things has been going down.

So the total amount we're spending on non-pensioner welfare benefits as a share of GDP is pretty similar now to how it was in 2015, which is lower than it was just after a financial crisis.

The context for these claims about out-of-work benefits is, of course, the idea that lots of people aren't working.

Maybe they're too sick.

Maybe they can't find jobs, maybe they're skyving and playing us for fools, whatever the reason, it's bad.

But is it really true that lots of people aren't working?

So it may surprise many people to know that the employment rate for working-aged people in the UK is near historic highs.

It's perhaps a percentage point lower than it was just before COVID-19, but still, you know, it's back to the level of about 2018 or so.

And when we got to that level in 2018, we we were celebrating reaching a historic high in the employment rate.

Under the surface of that historic high is a long-term increase in the proportion of women in paid employment, while the trend for men isn't so encouraging.

So overall, should we be worried about the figure of 6.5 million people claiming out-of-work benefits?

One of my worries is that there is a really genuine social problem here,

which we're at risk of not tackling.

So as I said, you know, the proportion of working age men who are out of work went up hugely in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has never really recovered very much.

Which ties to my second worry, which is that instead of having that debate about the real issues and how to tackle them, we have a sort of sham debate about loud headlines misrepresenting, often undeliberately, because the statistics are hard to get your head around.

And

it is very difficult to get a headline to say that big scary number that you had over there.

Actually, it's not as big and scary as you thought.

It's all a bit more complicated than that.

Our thanks to Professor Ben Baumberg-Geiger.

Sometimes on more or less, you see a number that just seems like it can't possibly be true.

And yet, when you look closely, it turns out it is correct.

One such example popped up in a recent article in the Financial Times by friend of the programme John Byrne Murdoch.

In his column, he presented some data about pensioners in France and elsewhere, including a graph which declared that French pensioners now have higher average incomes than working-age adults.

How can this be right?

Surely most people retire on a lower income than they've been earning during their working years, and incomes tend to increase over time too, So today's pensioners were earning less in their 40s than today's 40-somethings.

Weren't they?

We asked John to explain what's what.

Straight out of the gate, I think one thing that people find puzzling about this is you think, well, working age incomes are X and the average pension is less than X, so how can this be true?

So the first thing is that when we're talking about household income here for the working age, that's going to include some houses that have no people in work, some that only have one person in work, some where it's two, but maybe one is part-time, one is full-time.

Whereas, of course, with the pension, that is a guaranteed amount of money received by everyone above that age, everyone who's retired in the household.

So not everyone has a job, but every pensioner has a pension.

Exactly.

That explains how the pensioner income can be more than 100% of the working age average income.

And there's another caveat too, the process of something called equivalization.

Which is how we make a household with, say, two people comparable to a household with six people when we talk about those household incomes.

There are different ways of dividing up the household income by the number of people in the house and different methods give different weightings to, for example, dependent children.

So there are different ways of doing this which lead to slightly different numbers and one of the things that pushes French pensioners above the working age population is how that process is done.

So it's not that the total amount of money in a pensioner household, for example, is necessarily higher than the equivalent for the working age.

It's that when you adjust for household composition and the fact that those pensioner households are often just one or two older people on their own, whereas the working age have to support more people, which is the one number above the other.

It's perhaps not surprising to hear that if there are different ways to make this sort of adjustment, they produce different results.

For France, if we think of the working age income as being 100,

my figure for France was 100.5 for the pensioners, so about half a percent higher income for pensioners than the working age.

But other sources have that in the high 90s, so sort of 95, 97.

But all things considered, that eye-catching claim is more or less true.

French pensioners do have a higher income on average than people of working age, or close enough.

Is this unusual?

John found some other countries which come close.

Italy comes in sort of 95, 96, 97, depending on different sources.

And John says Spain and Portugal come in around there too.

How about the United States?

So in the US, pensioners are at about 85, 86% of working age incomes.

So still relatively high, but significantly below and very much not in that sort of southern European ballpark.

And the UK?

The UK actually comes slightly below.

So British pensioners are just below 80% of working age incomes.

But that figure and indeed pretty much all the figures we've been talking about have been rising significantly.

So in the UK, if we go back as recently as the 1990s, the average pensioner in the UK was only just over half of the average working age income, whereas that has now climbed right up to around 80% of the average.

These are figures, by the way, for disposable income.

in the technical sense, essentially income after you've paid tax.

And this means they don't take account account of a very important thing, housing costs.

Yeah, so I would have loved to be able to do an after-housing costs version of these stats.

Housing would likely change the numbers significantly because older people are more likely to have paid off mortgages and so own their own homes, which obviously costs less than paying a mortgage or paying rent.

We don't have a good cross-country comparison of housing costs, but we can get a sense of how housing costs matter in the UK from the Resolution Foundation think tank.

So they looked at this in different slices of the population, of the income distribution, as it were.

So both the median, which is the middle person in the income distribution, as well as those towards the top and the bottom.

And they found that at all three points, so the sort of bottom fifth, top fifth, and the median, pensioner incomes after reducing housing costs have overtaken the equivalent point of the working age population in recent years.

So most pensioners are better off than most working age people once you take into account housing costs.

Exactly.

And so at the bottom that obviously makes sense because what pensions essentially do is they flatten the income distribution.

They give everyone a minimum which isn't so much the case for people of working age.

But the fact that this was true even at the top end was remarkable.

So there's a lot going on behind these numbers.

But just coming back to France, the story that the numbers seem to be telling us is that the French pension system is incredibly generous.

I think, is that right?

Is the French pension system incredibly generous?

Yeah, I think that by pretty much any definition, the answer to that is yes.

So if we look at the total amount of money that French pensioners receive from the state per year and compare that to other countries elsewhere in the West, France comes either top or in the top two or three countries.

But the other part is retirement age itself.

So throughout much of the West, the typical age at which people leave work, so this isn't just the legal definition, but when people actually leave work, is increasingly in the high 60s.

So the average across the OECD as a whole is 66 years old.

The average across Europe is slightly lower at 64.

But for France, it's 61 years.

So you've simultaneously got a larger number of older people receiving the pension and then those who do receive it get a larger amount than most countries.

And what does all this mean for the French government's budget?

Not hugely good news, I would say.

Thanks to John Byrne Murdoch of the Financial Times.

And we spoke to him before the Office for National Statistics published data on earnings, which make it likely that the UK state pension will be increased next year by 4.7%.

You're listening to more or less.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Loyal listener Steve Hall got in touch to ask about a fishy stat he heard on a travel show on the BBC.

Here is presenter Simon Reeve from his series Traveling Scandinavia, speaking to fish farm billionaire Inger Berg about his massive open water fish farm.

Inge claims this is one of the most efficient methods of meat production with low inputs of feed.

One kilo feed to produce one kilo fish.

When you see a chicken, it's close to two kilo feed to produce one kilo of chicken.

And I think pork is close to three kilo feed to produce one kilo pork.

No wonder he's a billionaire.

What sorcery is this?

One kilogram in, one kilogram out?

Doesn't the fish need some feed to, well, live on?

A salmon, some kind of magical meat maker?

To find out what is going on, I spoke to Kaya Waxenberg, a food systems researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

I asked her, are salmon the ecological equivalent of a perpetual motion machine?

So you're right, it is implausible to have one kilogram of feed magically transform into one kilogram of salmon.

It would kind of defy the laws of thermodynamics, right?

But it's not to say that salmon is not an extremely efficient animal production system, which it is.

So that sort of number of one kilogram to one kilogram is probably referencing a thing we use to measure the efficiency of livestock systems, which is called the feed conversion ratio, or the FCR, which measures the quantity of dry matter and feed that you need to produce one kilogram of that animal out of a farm system, which tends to be, I mean, not one, but more like 1.2, 1.1 maybe in a very efficient system for salmon.

So it's quite good in terms of efficiency, yeah.

Okay, so it's true that there is this thing called the feed conversion ratio, the FCR,

and it is nearly one to one for salmon.

We should unpack that a little bit more.

What is it for

other animals?

So it does tend to be quite a lot higher for other animals.

You're talking about more like

midway between one and two for poultry and the very efficient systems for poultry, but more like eight for sort of feedlock cattle and up to twenty-five for pasture-fed cattle.

So in terms of if you compare salmon to other livestock or even other fish, they are quite efficient.

And that's because they're cold-blooded, so they're not using the energy to heat their bodies.

They can sort of use a lot of that energy in order to grow.

But also, if you think about if you're swimming around in a swimming pool, you use a lot less energy than you would use sort of walking around.

So there's a buoyancy effect on the surface.

Maybe if you're a salmon, I'm not sure I do, but

fair enough.

But they are using a lot less energy to move around than, say, cattle or pigs.

Before you start shouting at your radio, although we are focusing on this term efficiency, it is possible, in fact, it's quite likely, that a very efficient system may also be very harsh on the animals and potentially highly polluting too, but that is a topic for another day.

Today, we're just focusing on this one weird metric.

Metric?

I know that salmon must be really efficient, but how could you possibly take a kilogram of fish food and turn it into a kilogram of salmon?

There must be, you would think there must be some losses along the way.

So, what am I missing?

Yeah, definitely.

So, there's quite a lot going on that's not measured by that metric.

Firstly, that's for one individual salmon.

So, if you take it to the whole farm level, there's some feed that goes into the system that isn't eaten, and that's not included in that feed conversion ratio.

But also, with things like disease or just natural mortality, you tend to lose some of the salmon before harvest.

So, you're feeding the salmon, but then they don't make it to harvest, so that's a feed waste there.

So, if you include those two things, there's something called the economic feed conversion ratio, which is more like 1.3 for salmon, so it's a bit higher.

But the main thing we're missing out with this ratio is we're just considering mass to mass, right?

So, how much feed do you feed in to get a certain mass of salmon out?

Which isn't really comparing like with like, right?

Because salmon is fed this really energy-dense, sort of pelleted food, and you get salmon out, 60% of which is edible, but a lot of which is sort of bones that we don't eat.

So that's not really a mass that we can consider food.

But also the salmon contains a significant amount of water, right?

So it's less calorie dense than the feed going in.

So really, if we talk about energy efficiency, that's sort of more what we should be interested in.

Interesting.

So if you talk about the energy conversion efficiency, it's actually more like 25%.

So 75% of the calories that are fed into the system tend to be lost either in the tissues that aren't edible or to other things like the energy they use for locomotion and just maintaining their metabolism.

So no, fish do not defy the laws of physics.

And there's one more stat you need to put salmon efficiency in the proper context.

You see, salmon feed is in part made from other fish, fish which aren't farmed but caught in the ocean.

You put fish in and you get fish out.

So the current fish in fish out ratio as of 2020 was just slightly under one, which means you'd need slightly less than one kilogram of wild fish to produce one kilogram of salmon, along with everything else that goes into the feeds.

And that's a huge improvement on sort of what it used to be.

So in 2000, you'd need three kilos of wild fish just to produce one kilogram of salmon.

Thanks to Kaya Waxenberg.

Sometimes I can just feel that we're going to do another item.

Something inside me just knows.

You sure it isn't because I've just sat down opposite you of a script?

Well, Lizzie, it could be that.

Or it could be that I have a special sense for these things.

Well, that is uncanny, Tim, because on my script it says, are there really just five senses?

Well, are there?

Do tell.

I shall.

So, the traditional senses taste, sight, hearing, smell, and touch, the big five, are what neurologists refer to as extraoceptive senses, aka they receive information about external sources, the outside world, and the earliest real description of them we have is from Aristotle.

What a lad.

Absolute lad, but he was writing a while back, and times have changed.

Neurologists now agree on humans having around nine senses, but some academics suggest we have up to fifty-three.

Fifty-three?

It was quite the jump from five.

So, what are we counting now that we weren't counting before?

Well, the traditional five were all the organs that sense things, so eyes, tongue.

You're gonna say ears next.

Wow, is that your sixth sense kicking in?

Might be.

Anyway, neurologists have added in sensory cell clusters that respond to stimuli or events that inform the brain.

And these are things like vestibular, so that's balance, thermoception, heat, proprioception, bodily and spatial awareness, nosiceception, the perception of pain, and inception, a director's ability or inability to recognise when a film is going on for too long.

I feel that last one might be fake.

Anyway, the film isn't that long.

Feels like a lifetime.

I'm going to need more evidence.

Fine, I also asked an expert about it.

Happy?

Yeah.

Ooh,

to be honest, I had young kids when I watched Inception, and I think I probably fell asleep in it.

So I don't remember, is the honest answer.

Well, good to know.

And

the five senses thing?

You want that as well?

Fine.

I asked the same expert about that, too.

His name is Dr.

Guy Leschziner.

He's not the best film critic, but he is a professor of neurology and sleep medicine.

In a medical setting, when we see people with neurological disorders, it's very very clear that there are senses that don't fall within the category of the five classical senses.

So things like, for example, balance, and many people listening to this will have experienced vertigo or a spinning sensation.

That is a sense that is really fundamentally important to us knowing which way is up and whether or not we're rotating in space.

There are other senses as well that we don't talk about in the five senses.

So there is a sense called properception or joint position sense which tells us where our body is in space now we're not necessarily aware of it unless we lose it and if we lose it it can cause really quite devastating consequences so individuals can lose the ability to coordinate their limbs to walk properly or other problems and then The other major sense that we don't talk about is a sense called intraception, which is our ability to monitor what's happening within our own bodies, our heartbeat, our gut, for example.

And we know that different people have variable degrees of intraception, which has some impact on certain neurological conditions.

So definitely more than five.

Okay, so I can see how we get to eight or nine senses, but 53?

So this is when you start taking the idea that humans are just sensory beings.

So everything we process and perceive is in a sense, a sense.

So for example, a sense of colour, a sense of what emotion that colour evokes.

I fear this list is never going to end.

Oh, that's your sense of foreboding kicking in.

But don't worry, Guy doesn't buy it either.

I think that's probably pushing it.

I would include that all as vision.

Guy says that the rule of five is a good starting block to teach kids about the main senses, but medically speaking, it is limited.

Well, I think that's a classical understanding of the organs that mediate our senses.

So, the eyes, the ears, the skin, the mouth, and the nose.

But actually, you know, modern medicine tells us that that is a vast oversimplification.

I'm a self-possessed 25 senses, most notably, my sense of fashion.

Thank you, Lizzie.

If you want to learn more about the science in this area, Guy Lesziner presented a series for Radio 4 on the subject, imaginatively titled The Senses.

It's on BBC Sounds, and I can promise you that the programme on vision contains a story you will never forget, although it's not for the squeamish.

That is all we have time for this week.

Please send your comments and questions to more or less at bbc.co.uk.

We'll be back next week.

Until then, goodbye.

Nature Bang.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley, I'm Emily Knights, and in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

With the help of evolutionary biologists.

I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

And spongologists.

Is that your job title?

Are you a spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres.

It's science meets storytelling.

With a philosophical twist.

It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds.

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