🚨 NEW: Britain’s most powerful people are still 5x more likely to have been privately educated than the general population. Our brand-new research reveals that jobs in the media, business, charity, creative and public sectors remain dominated by those from private schools ⤵️🧵

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk

Exc: Families on benefits could be paid hundreds of pounds a month to stop them discouraging their teenage children from taking apprenticeships Ministers are considering grants in cases where those aged 16 and 17 can cause their parents to lose money by leaving education

Seven in 10 in the UK worry about AI’s economic impact - and six in 10 think it will cut more jobs than it creates. These findings come from a new study on attitudes to AI & the future of work, launched at the first King’s AI Summit: Workforce Futures. kcl.ac.uk/news/one-in-five-b…

Every child deserves the best start in life, but the next generation face worse prospects than the last. That’s why I’d restore Sure Start - with an extra £1.7bn funded by the wealth tax that actually works - to help close the gap between the richest and poorest backgrounds.

Living standards for lower-income households were especially hard hit in the last few years. For poorer families, annual incomes have sunk, on average, since the end of the pandemic, and truly plunged at the very bottom. Read how to reset Britain’s economic policy buff.ly/EIq0o5n