According to a poll commissioned by Radio 5 Live, the answer is 'family'.

What has happened to families in the past fifty years?

They are more dismembered than at any time in Britain's history. There is less marriage and more divorce. There are many more people living alone.

It follows that what appears to be the most profound source of happiness in people's lives has been seriously damaged.

I argue in The Welfare State We're In that the welfare state is a major cause of 'broken families'. And through this mechanism, the welfare state has indirectly undermined the greatest source of human happiness.

Travesty of our 'stagnating' schools: In a damning indictment of Labour, OECD condemns British education which is now inferior to Estonia's

By Kate Loveys

Britain has plummeted down worldwide education rankings in the last decade, according to definitive figures which shame Labour’s record on schools.

Despite doubled spending since 2000, the education of teenagers has ‘stagnated at best’.

The verdict is a damning indictment of Tony Blair’s mantra that his three top priorities in government were ‘education, education, education’.

Falling behind: British students are at a disadvantage compared to many others around the world

Britain has now fallen behind such relatively poor nations as Estonia, Poland and the Slovak Republic in reading, maths and science.

Although spending has risen from £35.8billion to £71billion, the education of teenagers has failed to register any improvement and in some areas has deteriorated rapidly.

In stunning proof that taxpayers did not get value for money, the UK slipped from eighth to 28th in maths, from seventh to 25th in reading and from fourth to 16th in science over the same period. Poland now ranks ten places ahead of the UK in reading and is three ahead in maths.

Even more disturbingly, the study found that a fifth of 15-year-old Britons are ‘functionally illiterate’, which ‘significantly reduces their chances of success in later life’.

The figures were released yesterday by the highly respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which compared the standards of 15-year-olds in 65 developed countries.

British children’s poor reading skills are said to be partly because they spend too much time on computers rather than reading books, but are also a tragic reflection of the education they have received.

Nor has it helped that the UK has a relatively low proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And having some of the world’s ‘best-educated’ parents has not improved the standards of Britain’s children – raising serious questions about the effective role of parents in UK schools.

The study was based on two-hour tests of 500,000 15-year-old schoolchildren by the OECD. Some 65 countries were listed in this year’s rankings compared with 54 three years ago.

Andreas Schleicher of the OECD said overall scores achieved by UK pupils were ‘stagnant at best, or marginally lower, whereas many other countries have seen quite significant improvements’.

The UK, despite being the eighth-biggest spender per pupil on education, with an average of £8,892 a year at secondary level, performed below the international average in maths, only just above in reading and slightly better in science.

The Far East had strong performers with the region of Shanghai-China coming top in all three subjects and Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan all ranking high.

Finland, which places strong emphasis on teacher quality, was ranked highest European nation.

Subject by subject: This table shows just how far the UK has fallen down the league tables

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336410/OECD-condemns-British-education-inferior-Estonias.html#ixzz17X1vaQGo

The OECD Pisa studies are far from perfect, for reasons mentioned in The Welfare State We're In. In at least one earlier report, the study flattered the British state schooling in two ways: 1. The overall figure included private schools which had outstanding results on an international basis and 2. Some schools declined to take part in the study and it seemed likely at the time that these were schools with lower attainment levels. So a drop in the British position may be partly because the OECD has simply improved its methods of assessing British schools.

The remark about 20% functional illiteracy is, in itself, an appalling condemnation of British state education.

Meanwhile I cannot help being a little suspicious of the stand-out result for Shanghai. I note that the assessment was done by a third party. I can imagine that the Chinese authorities saw it as a matter of pride that the country should do well rather than that it should be objective. So I wonder whether any techniques were used to skew the results.

But one thing about the article below is most remarkable: the assertion that the vast majority of Chinese children have private tuition in addition to their official schooling. This is also true in South Korea.

However, the OECD noted that China has long been organised around competitive exams, with schools working their students long hours every day and into the weekend.

Students are accustomed to "intense examinations and tests" and therefore may have been better suited to the PISA test. In addition, it estimated that eight out of ten Shanghainese schoolchildren get additional, out-of-hours, private tuition.

Meanwhile, Chinese students tend to spend less time on sport and other activities which are not core components of the "gaokao", a set of exams that determines their place at university, and indeed in life.

The pressure of the gaokao has been blamed for a lack of creativity in China by some critics. Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University, whose son is at a Shanghai middle school, wrote in October that "this rigid examination system has created an exam-oriented education from the kindergarten, a destruction of talent and waste of youth."

He added that he felt that 80 per cent of his son's studies had not helped him learn something new, but had prepared him for tests. "Doing exercises every day is like practising gymnastics, repeating the same moves every day, dozens or hundreds of times in order to make sure that absolutely no errors are made during the exam."

The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international third-party, working with Chinese authorities, the OECD said.

Full OECD report here.

You can put a number on a waiting list. You can measure the number of people who survive different kinds of cancers for five years. You can measure how long people wait in Accident and Emergency. But you can't easily measure the number of elderly people who are not helped to eat and drink or the number who are left to lie for hours in their own urine. Perhaps, though, it would be possible to measure how many are lying on hard beds when they should be on air-filled mattresses to reduce the risk of bed sores?

All this is relevant today because the Daily Mail and Radio 5 Live, among others, have given plenty of attention to a report by the Patients' Association about the treatment of the elderly.

Here is a typical example that has been brought forward:

Last November, the grandmother was admitted to Queen’s Hospital in Romford, Essex, with chronic heart failure after the care home where she had lived for a year became worried about her after a fall.

Mrs Dowsett, a local government consultant, brought her mother home-made food.

But although it was placed in front of her, other patients said staff did not help her to eat or drink.

The call alarm buzzer was also repeatedly left out of her reach.

One day, after using a bedpan, she was left calling for help and ‘in a very uncomfortable position — like a turtle on its back’, said Mrs Dowsett, who had twice to go and tell a nurse before anyone went to help her mother on the ‘understaffed’ ward.

Requests for painkillers were refused.

On another occasion she arrived to find her mother ‘looking like she was dead but still alive, screaming in pain, ­incoherent, clinging to the bed in a foetal position’.

Her mother also developed bedsores, which went undetected for days.

She was discharged on December 3, readmitted to hospital 16 days later and died on December 21 from a heart attack.

An investigation was launched after a complaint by the care home about the bedsores.

A report by the safeguarding adults team found that on the ‘balance of probability’ there was ‘neglect’. It also found her diet and nutrition should have been properly monitored.

The report added that the police were contacted for their stance and they advised ‘it would be a criminal matter if it was an individual who had the sole care of the patient. As it appeared this was the failing of the institution as a whole, they advised that the institution should investigate their own failings.’

That was the Daily Mail report. It is in full here.

And here is how the article begins:

Tens of thousands of elderly people are suffering appalling care at the hands of the NHS every year – pushing complaints to a record high.

For the first time last year, more than 100,000 patients and relatives were forced to issue complaints after being let down by the Health Service.

Hundreds of thousands more won’t have bothered to complain because they have so little faith that the NHS will listen.

Must do better: Complaints about the treatment of elderly patients within the NHS have soared

The Daily Mail is today backing a campaign by leading charity, the Patients Association, for an overhaul of the complaints system to make it completely independent – and end the scandal which sees people forced to complain to the hospitals against which they have a grievance.

And we are backing their appeal to raise £100,000 to boost their helpline which helps angry NHS patients submit complaints and has become inundated in recent years.

I am glad to see the Patients' Association getting so much coverage for this important story. It is good that the British public is increasingly getting to grips with the unwelcome reality that the NHS has major failings. My only slight regret is that the conclusion reached by the Patients' Association is that we should 'call Matron. I have heard this cry for at least the past two decades, probably more. Newspapers and politicians take up the cry but it never seems to result in a real change. And meanwhile there is a failure to face up to the truth that the problem is systemic. The problem is the nature of the NHS - a top-down monolith with all the same sorts of malfunctions and waste that normally exist in state monopolies.

We need to change the system. The OECD lists six different types of healthcare system (see previous entry). Judging by the results we have experienced in Britain, almost any of the others would be preferable. The government should commission an enquiry using people of all political persuasions to look at systems around the world and find the one that would best suit our needs.

At present, many of us have bitter experience of how badly the NHS has treated elderly people that we love. This must change.

They found that Australia, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Iceland got the most value for money and that if all countries could follow their example, life expectancy at birth could be raised by more than two years on average across the OECD nations.

The report noted that the UK - the seventh most inefficient country for healthcare among the 29 members - had: infant mortality rates among the highest; life expectancy for women among the worst; and one of the highest rates of avoidable deaths with only Portugal and Denmark worse.

and again:

"The UK has fewer acute care beds and high-tech equipment like scanners than other OECD countries. It also has fewer doctors and fewer doctor consultations per capita."

The Daily Telegraph, which is not very full unfortunately, is here.

Here is a link to the full OECD report.

Here a few snippets:

An encouraging note about healthcare systems based on private insurance:

Inequalities in health status tend to be lower in three of the four countries with a private insurance-based system – Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland – indicating that regulation and equalisation schemes can help mitigating cream-skimming and the effects of other market mechanisms which can raise equity concerns

And here is a rather sad comment about working out which system is best:

Efficiency estimates vary more within country groups sharing similar institutional characteristics than between groups. This suggests that no broad type of health care system performs systematically better than another in improving the population health status in a cost-effective manner.

On page 15 of the report the healthcare systems of the advanced world are divided into six types. The categories are not exactly pithy or easy to remember.

The new government seems to have recognised this through the measure below. It should probably be getting more attention than it has so far.

The government has created a £1bn funding pool to reward local authorities for pushing ahead with new housing developments, in a move that brings much needed clarity to the housebuilding industry.

Under the New Homes Bonus incentive scheme, announced by Grant Shapps, housing minister, on Friday, the government will match the council tax that local authorities generate from new homes for the first six years.

“For too long communities have fought against development because they can’t see how it does anything to improve their lives. Centrally imposed targets created a bitter legacy of animosity between developers and local communities, who fought pitched battles through the planning system, with councils permanently caught in the crossfire. I’m determined to change this,” said Mr Shapps.

The full story in the Financial Times is here.

I wonder if this is an example of a think tank really changing policy. Four years ago, a think tank compared planning laws in Britain with those in Germany and Switzerland. There was a series of three publication. The Policy Exchange booklet I still have was called Better Homes, Greener Cities and was written by Alan W Evans and Oliver Hartwich. It was excellent research which pointed out that in Switzerland, I think, local authorities gain financially when they allow development. So the local authorities and their tax and council taxpayers benefit financially. This creates an incentive to allow development to counter the obvious reluctance people have to allow development in their backyard.

The Coalition government seems to be introducing something along these lines. How much difference it will make I do not know.

The bad news:

The key bad news is that the much heralded 65% rate of benefit withdrawal is only benefit withdrawal. It does not included the impact of tax or national insurance. So people can still face a combined rate of benefit withdrawal with tax and national insurance of well over 65%.

Page 55. For low-earners but who nonetheless earn enough to pay tax, the incentive to increase their pay has been improved but still not to a really attractive level. Yes, there are 0.1million who will cease to face a tax/national-insurance/benefit-withdrawal rate (known as the Marginal Deduction Rate) on increased earnings of over 90%. Thank goodness for that. There will also be 0.4million people who won't face a rate of 80-90% which is also good. But the numbers facing a rate of 70-80% will increase from 1.7million to 2.0million. I think that rate is still much too high. I wonder if a big increase in personal allowance - with adjustment to the tax bands and perhaps a higher standard rate - would go some way towards fixing the problem?

The good news:

p54 For really low earners - those whose income is not taxable at all - the tax/national-insurance/benefit-withdrawal rate on increased earnings for 0.1million people has been over 90% and another 0.1million have been facing 80-90%. Now no one will face a rate above 60-70%. Excellent.

p56 Those who are currently unemployed will not longer anything like such penal rates of tax/national-insurance/benefit withdrawal rates (know as the Participation Tax Rate) on taking work for 10 hours a week. At present 0.6million are facing a rate of over 90%. That is a scandal - an appalling failure of past governments. Another 0.6 million face 80-90% which is also far too high. Under the new system, a modest 0.2million will face a rate of 70-80%. Some 1million will have a rate of less than 60-70% and an even bigger number, 3.0 million will face less than 60%. A big improvement.

p57 It will very clearly be worthwhile for a lone parent to work under the new system, partly because of the universal credit and partly because of a 'more generous earnings disregard'.

Measuring incentives to work is a complex business. On some measures things look as though they will improve a lot. On others, less so. In every case, though, I expect the attraction of working would be a lot greater if the government could put the money into improving the benefits withdrawal rate to 55%.

I particularly enjoyed some of the visual demonstations of otherwise dry figures. There was a tall, transparent tube. Its total height represented all public servants - said to be seven and a half million. Then along came people dressed as representatives of the different front line services: a nurse, a policeman and so on. Each came with a bucket of liquid representing how many of them there are. After all of the liquid representing the front line services had been poured in, the measure had only reached just under two million people - and that included those employed in the private sector.

"So what do the other five and half million people do?" asked Durkin. There was then a mock quiz show based on "what's my line?" in which a panel tried to work out what jobs people did - often involving words like "consultant" and "coordinator".

Added 12th November 2010. It seems one can catch up on the this programme for nearly a month on this link: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion-pound-horror-story/4od

Emergency patients are being let down by the health service because managers are more concerned with meeting targets by treating those with appointments, the heads of Royal Colleges warn.

Patients who come in as emergency cases are stabilised and admitted but then left to wait for surgery

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, some of the country’s most senior doctors say they are “deeply frustrated” at the low priority given to Accident and Emergency.

Targets concerning waiting times and cancelled operations, introduced under Labour, result in managers pushing doctors to operate on patients whose care has been pre-planned, in order to avoid financial penalties. But they can also mean that those who come in as emergency cases are stabilised and admitted but then left to wait for surgery.

Studies have shown that elderly people with fractured hips who do not undergo surgery within 48 hours are less likely to regain full mobility. Younger patients with shattered pelvises, from motorcycle or horse-riding accidents, are less likely to walk again if their operations are delayed.

Full story in the Telegraph here.

Governments are always announcing ‘the most radical reform of the welfare state since Beveridge’. It came to seem like an annual event under Labour. But it really is happening this time.

It was very noticeable that Iain Duncan Smith gave special thanks to Nick Clegg for his support. He said that it would have been more difficult to get to this point - bringing in this welfare reform bill - without Mr Clegg's support.

Also striking was the way that the Labour shadow secretary of state suggested that Iain Duncan Smith would have liked to have a tax and benefits withdrawal rate of 55% but had had to settle for 65% because of lack of support by George Osborne. Duncan Smith of course replied that it was Labour who left the cupboard bare. The implication, of course, was that yes, in an ideal world Duncan Smith would have liked the rate to be 55%.

The changes being announced really put an end to the Beveridge concept of a welfare system. His idea was an insurance system - rather like that of many Friendly Societies. He wanted a flat rate contribution for a flat rate benefit. Simples, as the advertisement says. He intended and expected that means-tested benefits not dependent on contributions would be a minor part of the system since everyone would be covered by their insurance contributions. Well, that idea has been gradually disassembled. Now it is even less important.

The 65% rate does not include certain passport benefits like free school meals. If you are unemployed your child gets them. If you are employed, he or she does not. No taper. So the incentives to work are not quite as good as they at first appear. I believe the passport benefits might have been kept because some others in government - perhaps No 10 - wanted 'no losers'.

On the same tack, in his commons speech (see previous posting) Duncan Smith refers to top rates of tax and benefit withdrawal rates that are much higher: over 95% before the reforms and over 76% after. It is not clear to me at the moment how these are calculated. Those figures certainly make the reforms appear desperately needed.

It was noticeable that three or more Labour MPs congratulated Duncan Smith on his Commons statement. It was as if much of the political elite knew in its heart that this sort of reform was needed. Twenty years ago, these reforms would have caused an uproar from Labour. Now the whole attitude to benefits has changed. There is much more awareness of how they have gone wrong. Duncan Smith said in his press conference: "as a political class we have got this wrong for too long".

I spoke to Polly Toynbee of the Guardian after the press conference. She commented that the reforms were 'incremental' and 'technical' and that the tax credits introduced by Gordon Brown had gone a long way to make work pay. She said the old taper was 70% and the new one was 65%. A good change but not a revolution. I think this is unfair. For a start, the new taper includes housing benefit - a major issue. I don't think the taper she is referring to did. Also there were different kinds of taper for different benefits. I doubt that the overall rate was 70%. There are also the host of other reforms being brought in at the same time, including the restrictions on housing benefit and the work placements. The hard truth is that Labour did some incremental changes but took 13 years doing them. Duncan Smith has not gone as far as I would like, but he has covered a huge area and made work pay more clearly than for a generation - all worked out in about six months. It is a vastly better performance.

I remember one Labour secretary of state for work and pensions saying on the radio that the big difficulty was getting money out of the Treasury to help make work pay. Duncan Smith appears to have had precisely that difficulty. But through his determination and his preparation before taking office, he has done better on this than anyone before. One can only hope that if or when money gets easier, the government will go further to make work pay.

In the house, Duncan Smith spoke approvingly of the drive to increase the personal allowance. This helps make work pay for the low paid in a very direct and easy way without any paperwork. It was what Labour ignored, preferring complicated tax credits. Incresing the personal allowance is very much a Liberal Democrate policy and it is interesing to hear Duncan Smith speak approvingly of it.

I spoke to David Freud, one of the DWP ministers, after the press conference. I used to work with him at the Financial Times many years ago. He said 'We've got your book. We're doing what you said aren't we?'. Well, as he well knows, that is an oversimplification, to put it mildly. The book was not prescriptive, for a start. But it is nice to think it might have had some influence.

Duncan Smith is the man of the moment. But as Tolstoy argued in War and Peace, even the Napoleonic wars were not really just the work of one man. Those wars depended on many others - perhaps a great mass of the population. Similarly, these welfare reforms derive from many people. The change in attitude on the Labour side is crucial. So too among the Lib Dems. Peter Lilley was at the beginning end of the change in attitudes. And the public, though such things as opinion polls and in phone-ins, have shown a changed attitude. The background was right.

Here is a link to the white paper: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/universal-credit-full-document.pdf

Introduction

Mr Speaker, with permission, I’d like to make a statement on welfare reform.

In this House in October I set out our resolve to secure a welfare system fit for the 21st Century where work always pays and is seen to pay.

Following consultation a broad positive consensus has emerged – from Citizens Advice to the Institute for Fiscal Studies and across the political divide.

The White Paper we are publishing sets out reforms to ensure people will be consistently and transparently better off for each hour they work and every pound they earn.

We will cut through complexity to make it easier for people to access benefits.

We will cut costs, reduce error and do better at tackling fraud.

The detail is published today and the White Paper is available in the Library – let me take this opportunity to thank all who have helped build and write these reforms.

Context for Reform

Let me remind the House what the problem is we are trying to solve:

• 5 million people of working age on out of work benefits
• 1.4 million people who have been on out-of-work benefits for 9 of the past 10 years
• 2.6 million working age people claiming incapacity benefits of which around 1 million have been claiming for a decade
• almost 2 million children growing up in workless households – one of the worst rates in Europe.

Some have said recently that it is jobs – not reform – which is important. But in doing so they miss the point.

This is a long-standing problem in Britain.

We have a group of people who have been left behind, even in periods of high growth.

Even as 4 million jobs were created over 63 quarters of consecutive growth, millions of people in Britain remained detached from the labour market.

4.5 million people were on out-of-work benefits before this recession even started.

These reforms are about bringing them back in – I want them to be supported and ready to take up the 450,000 vacancies which are currently available in our economy.

If we solve this problem, we begin to solve the wider social problems associated with worklessness.

Measures

The measures in the White Paper get this process underway – they are the first key strand of our welfare reform.

• By creating a simpler benefit system we will make sure work always pays more than benefits.
• By reducing complexity we will reduce the opportunities for fraud and error – which currently cost the taxpayer £5bn per year

Mr Speaker, work is the best route out of poverty.

At present, some of the poorest who take modestly-paid jobs can risk losing £9 or more out of every £10 extra they earn.

The Universal Credit puts an end to some of these perverse disincentives that make it so risky for the poorest to move into work.

The highest marginal deduction rates for in-work households will fall from 95.8% to 76.2%.

And there will be a single taper rate of around 65% before tax.

This means that around 1.3 million households facing the choice to move into work for 10 hours a week will see a virtual elimination of participation tax rates of over 70%.

I wonder if Channel 4 knew what they were in for when they commissioned this film since these kind of arguments - presented at length - are not usually seen on British TV. If the channel knew what it was doing, then all credit to it. Maybe something really is changing in Britain. There was a time when most of the media elite would not contemplate giving airtime to such ideas.

Here is a link to the programme details.

The figure is from an Iain Duncan Smith speech last week. This is the key extract:

But when government abandons policies that support families, society can pay a heavy price.

Take poverty:

* lone parent families are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than two-parent families

Or Crime:

* children from broken homes are 9 times more likely to become young offenders
* and only 30% of young offenders grew up with both parents.

And overall wellbeing:

* Children in lone-parent and step-families are twice as likely to be in the bottom 20% of child outcomes as children in married families

So this is not some abstract debate.

The full speech is here.

I chaired a debate on climate change for a firm of lawyers. The main speaker arguing that global warming exists and is man-made was Professor Mark Maslin. He argued that the evidence was overwhelming and that none of 26 (?) computer models of climate change made around the world could make sense of the change that have occurred without assigning importance to CO2. But what made me veer towards believing that the 'warmists' could be right were the answers he and the other speaker on his side gave to the various objections that many people, including myself, have been aware of. These answers were during the debate and afterwards, at lunch.

The medieval warm period is a classic objection. If the earth got warm in medieval times when the human output of CO2 was tiny compared to now, then clearly other factors were more important. His colleague and he replied that the medieval warm period took place in Northern Europe but it does not appear to have occurred elsewhere on the planet. It was not 'global' warming.

It was objected that the earth had stopped warming in 1998. He and his co-speaker responded that this was taking just the land temperature. If you added in the ocean temperature, the rise in the temperature chart continued. He also added that taking 1998 was a bit of a trick on the part of the other side. That year was a sudden peak caused by particular factors (he mentioned them but I am afraid I forget what they were). If you exclude 1998, then the global warming shows a more continuous rise.

One thing is very clear. The issue is incredibly complex and none of us who are not specialists can ever hope fully to master it. It is fair to say that even he admitted some uncertainty about the behaviour of clouds. He also mentioned 'interesting' recent work on solar activity. Yet despite the complexity and some uncertainties, we are in the position of having to make major decisions on the basis of whether or not it is true. It is like having to choose a spouse without ever seeing her or him - relying instead on the supposed disinterested expertise of others who, themselves, cannot be 100% sure.

How do you make a decision in these circumstances as to whether to 'believe' or not? I guess that time and again I found his answers to objections plausible. One objection put to him was that scientists are shunned if they do not subscribe to warming theory. He said that on the contrary, if a scientist was able to prove man-made global warming wrong, he would make his reputation and win a Nobel Prize.

That rings true to me. Of course, as a lay-man, I do not think I am in a position to be dogmatic about man-made global warming, either way. I remain sceptical in the simple sense of being not sure. But I have changed my mind somewhat. I now tend to believe it could well be true whereas before I tended to believe it probably was not.

I put it to him that if man-made global warming is going on, there was an elephant in the room: the most effective way to cut it back would be to reduce the number of people in the world.

On this basis, you could answer that the biggest contribution to 'saving the world' had been made by China with its brutal 'one child' policy.

He commented that the production of CO2 per person in America was 22 times that of a person in China. So limiting population growth in China was not as important as it might appear. But he said that the Chinese certainly mention it in negotiations about climate change.

I then suggested that it followed from what he said that the biggest contribution that could be made in the short term to climate change would be a reduction in the population of America. He did not openly agree. I think he was holding back from reaching a conclusion which would appear so extremely illiberal!