Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons is The Spectator's Data Editor

Humza Yousaf’s legacy in eight graphs

Humza Yousaf has announced his resignation as First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party. His time was short, but he’s overseen a dramatic change in the party he’ll now cease to lead: a discipline once revered by opponents has given way to a party in open dissent. As he prepares to leave the

Lockdown’s impact on children is only beginning

Children who started school in the early days of the pandemic will have worse exam results well into the next decade. That’s according to a study released this morning by the London School of Economics, the University of Exeter and the University of Strathclyde. Researchers predict that 60 per cent of pupils will achieve worse than a

Worklessness hits eight-year high

Britain already has the worst post-pandemic workforce recovery in Europe. New figures out today show the problem is getting even worse. The number of those ‘economically inactive’ (not in work or looking for it) rose by a remarkable 150,000 in the last three months to 9.4 million – equivalent to the adult population of Portsmouth

Has the jobs market cooled enough to cut interest rates?

Is the Bank of England about to cut interest rates? Today’s labour market statistics might just give them the room to do so. The latest data, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning, shows that the number of payrolled employees is up, the unemployment rate is up, vacancies are down and pay

Britain’s worklessness disaster

Whilst Jeremy Hunt’s cut to National Insurance may grab the headlines, the real story of today’s Budget was hidden in the official forecasts accompanying it. These forecasts point to a disaster for Britain’s labour force. The UK already had one of the worst post-lockdown workforce recoveries in the world, with a record 2.8 million people

Too many people in Britain aren’t working

Britain’s worklessness crisis is getting worse. This morning the ONS released figures showing that 1.3 million are on unemployment. But that figure masks a welfare crisis that politicians are doing little to address. Unemployment only covers those actually looking for a job – the real problem is how few are. The true benefits figure goes unpublished

Full extent of sick-note Britain revealed

We already know that Britain has a massive sick-note problem but we did not, until today, know just how large. Every three months, the ONS surveys 35,000 people and uses the results to guess how many (for example) are not working due to long-term sickness. That figure had been 2.6 million. But it has today

Sobriety isn’t worth it

Absolutely nobody feels better at the end of Dry January. Mornings are still a struggle, you’re as tired as ever, and if anything the neurotic voice in your head is even louder. Yes, you may have gone to the gym every Sunday, but how has your life improved? It hasn’t. My own Dry January was

Has Britain’s jobs market bounced back?

The jobs market has turned a corner. Vacancies have fallen again to 934,000, down 49,000 in the last three months of the year, the longest continuous fall on record. Wage growth slowed to 6.5 per cent in cash terms – which will please the Bank of England – but luckily for workers inflation is falling

There’s another dodgy data scandal brewing

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

Was Eat Out to Help Out really behind the second wave?

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

We’re still recovering from lockdown’s impact on children

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

Dodgy data risks breaking Universal Credit

As many as one in 20 Universal Credit payments to working Brits are wrong. Claimants are at risk of destitution when they’re underpaid and accused of fraud when they’re overpaid, as the Department for Work and Pensions has been using a flawed data stream provided by HMRC to calculate Universal Credit payments. This week The Spectator revealed how

The taxman’s dodgy data

Ten years ago, HMRC unveiled what was billed as ‘the biggest change’ to the tax system since PAYE began in 1944. The taxman mandated employers to report their workers’ pay every time they ran payroll. Introduced to support Universal Credit by providing earnings data in close to real time, it has since been used to

The Covid inquiry asked the wrong questions of Neil Ferguson

SPI-M-O are at the Covid inquiry this week. They’re the shadowy group of mathematical modellers who contributed – more than most – to the evidence that backed up lockdown. On Monday we heard from Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University. Surprisingly – for an inquiry that seems from the outset to be focused on the