Knowing What You're Talking About

Eoin Clarke makes a post about the shortfall in the number of new houses being built. In the middle of the post he says that:

More than 40,000 people sleep on our streets every night.

Tim Worstall picks him up on it pointing out that actually only 1,768 people sleep rough in England. What's going on?

The answer is that Clarke is relying on the following line from the ONS report on Housing and Planning:

During 2009-10, local authorities made 89,120 decisions on eligible applications for housing assistance under homelessness legislation. Nearly half of these - 40,020 - were accepted as owed a main homelessness duty, 70 per cent lower than the peak in 2003-04.

However, he wasn't careful enough with what he's talking about. Elsewhere, the ONS has a page with "Notes and definitions for homelessness data" which states:

The term "Homelessness" is often considered to apply only to people "sleeping rough". However, most of our statistics on homelessness relate to the statutorily homeless i.e. those households which meet specific criteria of priority need set out in legislation, and to whom a homelessness duty has been accepted by a local authority.
Such households are rarely homeless in the literal sense of being without a roof over their heads, but are more likely to be threatened with the loss of, or are unable to continue with, their current accommodation.

So there are about 40,000 people considered homeless under the ONS definition but only 1,768 people sleeping on the streets.

Graduate Earnings

Jonathan Hunt writes at LibDem Voice:

According to new figures published this week by the Office for National Statistics, graduates earn 85 per cent more than people with only GCSE qualifications over their working lives. Extrapolated over a 40-year career lifetime, graduates are likely to earn almost £1 million more than those on current average pay of some £25,000 pa.
...
When looked at from that end of the telescope, it does not seem too onerous for graduates to have to repay some £30,000 or so when as a result of that investment they earn many multiples of that sum. They will still be some £970,000 better off (before tax) than non-graduates by the time they retire.

He's been widely criticised there. He's made lots of mistakes in his methodology. Firstly, he picks GCSE as the comparator rather than the next-most qualified. Secondly, he ignores taxes. Thirdly, he ignores the extra years worked by those who stopped their education earlier.

Before correcting these mistakes it's also worthwhile pointing out that his chosen annual salary of £25,000 makes no sense. His source gives average hourly earnings for those who only have GCSEs as £8.68. In order for them to earn £25,000 a year they'd have to work for more than 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Not likely.

Anyway, the table below gives the values found from his methodology applied correctly with the points mentioned above (I assume 7.5 hours work a day for 230 days a year, or 1,725 hours a year):

	Median hourly pay	Annual Earnings (post tax)	Career Length	Total Income	Difference
Degree	£16.10	£21,248	40	£849,920	£0
Higher education	£12.60	£17,142	42	£719,964	£129,956
A Levels	£10.00	£14,092	43	£605,956	£243,964
GCSE grades A*-C	£8.68	£12,544	45	£564,480	£285,440

This report (pdf, page 3) claims that graduates earns £149,761 more over a lifetime. Other values I've seen range from £100,000 to £160,000. So Jonathan Hunt had the right idea but was sloppy in his application.

Clearly Paid Too Much

Andrew Tindall at Liberal Conspiracy sent a FoI request to the Cabinet Office to find out how much the e-petitions website costs. Turns out it cost £80,700 to develop and £32,000 a year to maintain. Andrew concludes:

So there we have it, they clearly paid too much for what was such an unstable service, but it’s still one of the cheaper government initiatives we’ve seen in recent years.

But wait, how much did the old e-petitions website cost? According to this Commons report (pdf):

The Deputy Leader stated that the set-up costs of the Downing Street site were £17,500 and that the annual running costs are £109,100.

So after two years, this one would cost £91,000 less than the one produced by Labour and would continue to cost £77,100 less each year.

Mayor's House Record Missing?

Does anyone know why Boris Johnson's purchase of a new house doesn't appear to be in the Land Registry's database anymore?

The Daily Mail reports:

Land Registry documents show Mr Johnson and Ms Wheeler bought the house jointly on June 12, 2009, and that they have a mortgage for the property in both of their names.

Yet searching the Land Registry website shows that no record exists for that date on the road Boris is reported to live on. Does anyone know what's going on? Have I missed something?

Council Staff Wasting Time?

The Essex Chronicle reports:

ESSEX civil servants spent the equivalent of 2,200 working days last year on social network sites at work, a Chronicle investigation can reveal.
Our investigation shows that Essex County Council (ECC) staff spent 16,500 hours on Twitter and Facebook in the last 12 months – equivalent to one employee spending over six years on the two websites.
...
Since August 2010 staff wasted 342 working days house-hunting on property website rightmove.co.uk

Shocking, right? Wrong. How many staff does Essex County Council have? 7,539 according to a different report on the same figures. Let's do the maths:

for 16,500 hours to equal 2,200 working days we must have 7.5 hours per day. Now, total hours spent on social networking sites per employee comes to 2.2 hours. Over 12 months.

And house-hunting? Just over 20 minutes. Over 12 months.

I'm no expert but I reckon that that's pretty good actually.

Pictures of MPs Houses

After people made a fuss about YourKen publishing an unidentified photo of Boris Johnson's house we now have Louise Mensch complaining about the Daily Telegraph publishing a photo of MP Simon Kirby's house and telling everyone that it's his house. She tweeted:

I hope Daily Telegraph will take down its online picture of Simon Kirby MP's family home and will not reprint it in its print edition tmrw

The only reason for not showing photos of MPs houses would be to keep their addresses secret. The problem is that even without the photo there is enough information in the article to find out Mr Kirby's precise address in a matter of minutes.

How? The article tells us how much his house is worth and approximately where it is and when he bought it. Use that information to find his house from the Land Registry. Simples. The only way to realistically keep MPs' addresses secret would be either to not include their info on public records or else ban people from publishing that information.

Do we really want to keep the activities of our elected officials a secret like that?

Higher Borrowing Under Osborne?

Cormac Hollingsworth at Left Foot Forward claims that:

... the City now expects the coalition to borrow £10 billion more than the OBR prediction, blasting through Alistair Darling’s budget for 2011/12 by at least £5bn.

This claim seems odd indeed. Firstly, no source is given for the City's expectations. Secondly, this City prediction is being compared to the OBR prediction for the Darling Plan. Thirdly, the numbers don't appear to add up. Quoting from the article:

To repeat the numbers, the OBR prediction for Darling’s budget plans was for Total Managed Expenditure in 2011/12 to be £708.9bn and receipts of £581.5bn, generating a borrowing figure of £127.8bn.
The latest OBR prediction for the March Budget was TME £710.4bn and receipts of £588.6bn, a borrowing figure of £121.8bn that was already a rise from the June emergency budget of £116bn due to a downgrading of growth.

But if the OBR prediction is for £121.8bn of borrowing and the City expects £10bn more, that comes to £131.8bn. That's exactly £4bn more than under the Darling Plan, not "at least £5bn". What have I missed?

Of course, the OBR has not been continually updating its forecasts for the Darling Plan like it has for the actual plan being implemented. Their prediction for the Darling Plan assumed 2.6% growth in 2011. How much would that have to fall before borrowing under the Darling Plan became more? And would anyone argue that under Darling we'd have 2.6% growth given what's happening globally?