@StrongerInNos

Labour market, welfare, legal bits’n’pieces. Sometime ‘expert’, ex Customs & Excise, Treasury, DWP. DMs open. Longer stuff on Medium will restart summer 2026.

medium.com/@StrongerInNos
Joined October 2013
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  • Followers1.6K
7.7KMedia
Something from me on Friday's @UKSupremeCourt Uber judgment strongerinnos.medium.com/the… ... @JolyonMaugham
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What fresh shrinkflation hell is this? Wray&Nephew is always Overproof (63%) and ‘Guaranteed Full Strength’. Yet today I reached for a bottle where it usually sits to find it ‘Fullproof’ at a measly 43% and the only guarantee one of full flavour 😤. No I didn’t buy it.
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🧵 On this week's productivity adjustments by @ONS. Just putting stuff from their three charts all together in one - since 1997 output per hour per job and per worker have all grown by very nearly the same amount despite the temporary CoVid divergence... 1/3
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The adjustments have only made a material difference to one of these measures: output per hour. The others are virtually unchanged. The reason is that post-GFC hours worked per person and per job have been in decline. So the adjustment doesn't mean that... 2/3
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more stuff has been produced than thought just that the same people as previously estimated have produced the same stuff as previously estimated but in fewer hours than thought. So there's no meaningful contribution to the puzzle of stagnant productivity growth post-GFC 🤷‍♂️ 3/3
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From yesterday's official labour market statistics: in round-number news there were for the first time 2 million more workers born outside EU than pre-CoVid. Number of UK-born workers still 1/2 million lower than pre-CoVid.
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If turnout in Clacton is indeed 43% and if Farage held onto all his 2024 votes then that would mean 13,000 or so voting for Binface et al.
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Biggish win for Home Office as all grounds of judicial review challenge to the Student Visa Brake fail in the High Court. judiciary.uk/wp-content/uplo… 1/3
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The brake stops people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan being granted student visas with the policy basis that too many go on to claim asylum when nothing's changed in their home countries. Similar brake stops Afghans from being granted Skilled Worker visas too. 2/3
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Of passing interest is internal policy submissions seen by court show thought given to long list of countries with far more student arrivals but still high numbers of asylum claims by them e.g. Pakistan. Unequivocal nature of win might see thought given to extending it🤷‍♂️3/3
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"housing crisis" pic. Over the 50 years to 2025 the number of dwellings in England increased by 52%. As population grew by just 35%, if the number of dwellings had increased at the same rate as population there would be 3 million *fewer* dwellings than there actually are now.
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Hmm. To fill 227 Olympic swimming pools would need about 1 in 6 of the c.4m households served by Thames Water to run a hosepipe for an hour. So this amount could be used on any one day. But over the year obviously not!
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
@BellRibeiroAddy
Jul 21
Thames Water leaked the equivalent of 227 Olympic swimming pools a day last year. That's far more than any hosepipe ban will save. It's time to put investment before profit and return water companies to public ownership.
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I’m old enough to remember John Healey in his first stint in the Treasury near 25 years ago. I found him very good on the tricky VAT anti-avoidance stuff I was doing in Customs then that led to the seminal ‘abuse of law’ success in the Halifax ECJ case.
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Passable ‘history rhyming’ thing that one of the very first things Blair did in 1997 was clear out everyone from Cardboard City that had built up over decades at Waterloo. Interesting to see whether the ‘flyover’ encampments disappear as quickly…
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Record advertised private rental rates - the ‘Britain’ figure quoted is what you’d be paying monthly on a £250k-£300k mortgage, the ‘London’ figure on a £500k-£600k mortgage…
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From @ONS latest release of baby names today. As usual, just to note that with over 6,500 names used for boys, even the most popular (together with all variations on the theme) only accounts for a small share.
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DWP recover benefit overpayments at a rate of 15% of the UC standard allowance. As most will go straight onto UC when granted asylum it seems trivially easy to recover asylum costs in the same way. If done on the same basis, a £10,000 cost would be recovered in ~ 13 years.
Home Office
@ukhomeoffice
Jun 30
Home Secretary @ShabanaMahmood will be granted the power to determine how much refugees must pay back for their housing and financial support. The amount can be adjusted to ensure fairness to taxpayers and that migrants aren't forced into destitution.
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From ONS today. Published very laggily so the data are from 2023. In England and Wales, rates of under-18 conception varied across local authorities by a factor of 10...🤰
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Today Spanish Supreme Court sentences ex-Minister José Luis Ábalos to 24 years in prison for his part in Spain’s own CoVid PPE corruption scandal. Will we ever see the like in the UK?
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If Burnham does become leader and if a snap election is called, I do hope the cover of the manifesto turns out to be like this…
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Michael O'Connor retweeted
Shiv Malik
@shivmalik
Jun 19
If you’re one of millions of millionaires that don’t work, the state gives you free travel, prescriptions, and £12k a year. If you’re a hard working doctor or lawyer with young kids you get taxed above 60%. That’s the UK economy in a nutshell. If you’re one of those millions of wealthy pensioners with a big private pension, how do you feel about this?
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