Michael Simmons

The government is reeling from the Post Office Horizon scandal. ‘Lessons must be learnt’, goes the cry around Westminster. But a computer scandal with striking similarity to the bugs in the Horizon system has been brewing under the Department for Work and Pension and HMRC’s noses for over a decade.  When Universal Credit was introduced to reform and modernise the benefits system in 2013 it needed a data system to drive it. HMRC came up with the solution. The taxman billed its new ‘Real Time Information’ system as the ‘biggest change’ to the tax system since PAYE began in 1944. Employers were mandated to report their worker’s pay every time they ran payroll.

Has migration to the UK peaked? Net migration in the year to June hit 672,000, down from 745,000 in 2022. Some 1.2 million people came to Britain whilst 508,000 moved overseas. The ONS says it’s too early to call this a downward trend, but that immigration seems to be slowing whilst emigration is increasing. Perhaps the biggest story though is the size of some of the revisions. The ONS had previously put the net migration figure for 2022 at just over 600,000. Today they found 140,000 more people and revised it up to 745,000. This is a staggering change. Taken with today’s figure, that new peak suggests numbers are coming down. But how much can we trust the ONS’s estimates? Will today’s number be revised up in six months’ time?

Did Eat Out to Help Out increase Covid? It’s a conclusion the inquiry and lockdown’s cheerleaders seem keen to push. Today they got their wish with Sir Patrick Vallance telling the inquiry it is ‘very difficult to see how it wouldn’t have had an effect on transmission’. Those comments have already been taken out of context with headlines concluding that the link had now been confirmed. But that’s not what the data tells us. Or what Vallance was saying. Eat Out to Help Out came up because of a written statement from Rishi Sunak that was read out to the inquiry. In it the Prime Minister says, 'I don’t recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions’.

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? Only later did No.

Did we lock down on a false premise? Yesterday was Ben Warner’s turn at the Covid Inquiry. He was an adviser, and one of the ‘tech bros’ brought in by Dominic Cummings to advise No. 10 on data. He was present at many of the early Sage – and other – meetings where the government’s established mitigation (herd immunity) plan was switched to the suppression (lockdown) strategy.  In Cummings’s evidence to the inquiry last week, he said that models didn’t play a big part in moving the government towards lockdown. Part of the written inquiry evidence supplied by his data man, Ben Warner’s, supports that too.

Some 140,000 children missed more than half of the school days they should have attended this spring. Research by the Children’s Commissioner, published today, finds that only 5 per cent of these ‘severely absent’ kids go on to achieve five GCSEs. For year ten and 11 pupils who are persistently absent – meaning they miss one day of school a fortnight – just over a third get the minimum five GCSEs. For rarely absent children the figure is 78 per cent. The Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, is calling for attendance league tables to be set up.  It’s no surprise that attendance dropped during Covid. But after lockdown many children just simply didn’t come back to school, as Harriet Sergeant pointed out in a cover piece for the magazine earlier this year.