Labour market, welfare, legal bits’n’pieces. Sometime ‘expert’, ex Customs & Excise, Treasury, DWP. DMs open. Longer stuff on Medium will restart summer 2026.
Joined October 2013
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7,618 Photos and videos
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22 Feb 2021
Something from me on Friday's @UKSupremeCourt Uber judgment strongerinnos.medium.com/the… ... @JolyonMaugham
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Jun 12
As @SpaceX IPO today makes it a $2 trillion company, that’s about the same as the combined GDP of Ireland, Sweden and Singapore.
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Jun 12
In ‘every little helps’ news, following today’s Court of Appeal win for HMRC against ride-provider Bolt locks in £1bn for the fiscal balance. Tho with this much at stake I guess Bolt will go to Supreme Court… judiciary.uk/wp-content/uplo…
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Seeing such comments very often. Accuracy depends on whether ‘out of work benefit’ means benefit being paid to someone not working or means a benefit only for out-of-work people. If the former then PIP *is* a main out of work benefit as it’s paid to over 3 million not working 🧵
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And only about a fifth of that number get PIP while working. So it’s mainly a benefit for out-of-work people. Only UC is paid to more people who aren’t working but a much higher proportion are working or looking for work - well over half.
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About the only benefit that is exclusively for people out of work is New Style JSA, paid to ~70,000 claimants. So if that’s what ‘out of work benefit’ means then we can celebrate that hardly anyone in the UK is on out of work benefits at all 🥳
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May 28
Pondering why UK GDP hasn't matched faster-growing EU countries. There's quite a clear correlation here: the less population grows (or the more it shrinks) the more GDP grows. And this is growth in whole economy GDP *not* per capita growth. UK (red) bang in line with trend.
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May 31
It’s easy enough to do but not terribly informative as falling population will increase GDP per capita compositionally (unless GDP goes with them of course).
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May 29
Milburn has a few paras on migration, noting "relationship between migration and youth employment is not straightforward. The effect depends on how employers recruit..." illustrated only with a chart of falling net migration. So here's a pic of how employers have been recruiting
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May 27
In France you have to make small contributions towards the cost of your healthcare but despite the generally trivial amounts debt of €1.5bn has built up so the French equivalent of our National Audit Office is recommending direct recovery from bank accounts of non-payers…
May 27
Le recouvrement pourrait augmenter de 500 millions d’euros par an grâce à cette mesure. →l.lefigaro.fr/ILB8
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May 19
From today's labour market statistics. Little change in overall employment numbers masks a further step up in workers born outside EU and rather a drop-off in UK-born workers.
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May 15
Dear @HMRCgovuk - while you dealt with this request for a number very quickly, why does the letter received a fortnight ago appear to be dated six years ago?? Only realised when proferring it as ‘letter from HMRC’ for an ID check and it was rejected for being too old 😂
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May 15
Dear @SteveReedMP - the UK economy is not growing faster than ‘the seven biggest economies on the planet’ as you said on @BBCr4today this morning. China is growing more, and India much more.
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I’ve hobbled down here with a broken foot. If you have a vote today then whoever you support make sure you use it!
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In UK exceptionalism news (not), Portugal has just extended the period for naturalisation for most non-EU nationals from 5 years to 10 years. Including for people already there.
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Apr 25
Fed to me on Facebook. IMO the ‘right to see where tax money goes’ isn’t worth much if pensions, UC (and presumably PIP etc) bundled up but split out adult social services? And what’s with apparently meaningful (but not) colour coding?
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Apr 23
Interesting detail in this is that migrant population within the EU has increased by ~58% since 2010. The equivalent figure for the UK is... almost exactly the same at ~56%.
A new report by @CReAM_Research is out!
Immigration to the EU has reached 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀: 64.2 million foreign-born residents lived in the EU in 2025, up by 2.1 million in one year.
The new CReAM at RFBerlin report by @tomfratti & Camilla Piovesan shows how uneven migration in the EU has become: Germany is the largest destination, while Spain recorded the fastest growth.
However, smaller countries like Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus face the highest relative pressure.
Read about it here: rfberlin.com/cream-report/03…
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Having been involved in international negotiations back in the day, and the sensitivity of parties to the teeniest textual nuances it seems incredible to me that any international agreement can have not been written down or recorded in any other way.
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Clearing out ‘grandad’s’ loft. End of first year of Beatlemania in which Beatles had 6 Number Ones in both UK and USA. In inflation-adjusted terms a £1 ticket would be ~£25 today. In wage-adjusted terms ~£45. So a very reasonably-priced date.
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