Why are more people claiming disability benefits?

Summary

More or Less: Behind the Stats

Episode Summary – March 19, 2025

Main Topic: Why are more people claiming disability benefits?

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Brief Overview

In this episode, Tim Harford and the More or Less team analyze the sharp rise in disability and incapacity benefits claims in the UK. With input from experts and an exploration of the numbers, the program investigates the causes, considers international comparisons, and debunks misleading narratives. Later, the episode addresses common statistical myths, including the UK's alleged imprisonment of social media users, the reliability crisis at the Office for National Statistics, and whether the UK really has the oldest housing stock in Europe.

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Segment 1: The Rise in Disability Benefits Claims

[01:45–10:09]

Key Points

• Government Welfare Reforms: Recent policy changes have put welfare spending, especially on health-related benefits for working-age individuals, under the spotlight.
• Statistical Spike: The cost of working-age health-related benefits rose from £36 billion in 2019-2020 to £48 billion in the last financial year (adjusted for inflation)—an increase of about a third in four years. Both disability and incapacity benefit cases increased by close to a million each.
  • Disability benefits cases: 2 million (2019) → 2.9 million (2024)
  • Incapacity benefits cases: 2.1 million (2019) → 3 million (2024)

"The increase in the cost of working age health related benefits is more or less evenly split between disability and incapacity benefits."
— Tim Harford [03:08]

• Reasons for Claims:

  • Mental Health Disorders account for a bit more than half the rise in disability benefit claims; the rest are physical health issues.
  • Incapacity benefit data is less detailed regarding conditions.

  "A bit more than half of [the] increase is accounted for by mental behavioural problems, but the other half, about 45%, is accounted for by people getting it for physical reasons."
  — Tom Waters, Institute for Fiscal Studies [04:09]

The Search for Underlying Causes

• Cost of Living Hypothesis:
  The idea that more people are claiming benefits due to economic hardship (“cost of living crisis”) is considered—but rejected because similar trends are not seen in other countries with similar pressures.

  "Basically, this is a UK phenomenon... No other country's seen anything remotely like that."
  — Tom Waters [05:06]

• Motability Scheme and Benefit Generosity:
  The suggestion that car leasing incentives (Motability scheme) or relatively generous UK benefits are behind the increase is dismissed. Both have existed for years without previous spikes.

  "It's a little bit harder to see how that could account for the really sharp rise that we've seen lately."
  — Tom Waters [06:16]

• Nation’s Health Trends:

  • Mental Health: Surveys and NHS statistics indicate a 36% jump in people contacting mental health services since 2019, especially among young people.
  • Physical Health: Data is mixed, but sickness absence in sectors like the NHS has increased (from just over 4% pre-pandemic to about 5%).

  "There's more people who are in contact with NHS mental health services since the pandemic, that's gone up really quite rapidly. It's a 36% increase since 2019."
  — Tom Waters [07:19]

  • Young People:
    • Growth in claims is fastest among young adults. A 20-year-old today is as likely to claim as a 39-year-old was in 2019.
    • Most young claimants cite mental and behavioural problems.

  "About 6 to 7% of people in their 20s are claiming, and most young people on disability benefits get it for mental and behavioral problems."
  — Tom Waters [09:20]

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Segment 2: Statistical Clarification — Social Media Jail Claims

[12:30–20:56]

Key Points

• Misinformation: The episode responds to a viral claim that the UK imprisons more people for social media posts than Russia.
  • The claim, repeated by prominent figures including Carla Sands and Elon Musk, is traced to a misinterpretation (arrests vs. imprisonments, differing legal contexts).
• Actual Figures:
  • UK (2017): 3,300 arrests under the Communications Act (not all for social media posts, very few leading to prison). Most sentences are fines, community service, restraining orders.
  • Russia (2017): 411 criminal cases for online activity (frequently involving political or anti-government activity).

"These types of crimes commonly receive sentences like fines, community service, restraining orders and being made to pay compensation to the victim. People generally only receive jail sentences under the most extreme cases..."
— Lizzie McNeil [15:48]

• Freedom Context:
  • Freedom House scores (out of 100): UK (78), Russia (20). Russia's real numbers are likely far worse, but data is unreliable due to the secretive state.
• Prisoners of Conscience:
  • Amnesty International explains that imprisonment for advocacy of violence or hatred does not count; data for Russia is far higher on “prisoners of conscience” and political prisoners.

"All in all, this is not a fact. The UK does not have more people in jail than Russia because they spoke what they thought was right or had an interest online."
— Lizzie McNeil [20:48]

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Segment 3: The Crisis in Labour Market Statistics

[22:36–29:22]

Key Points

• Importance of the Labour Force Survey (LFS):
  • Previously the most reliable source on jobs and employment trends in the UK, used by policymakers and economists.
• Crisis Unfolds:
  • Falling response rates, worsened by the pandemic and a switch from in-person to telephone interviews.
  • Attempted transition to a new “Transformed Labour Force Survey” caused greater disruption when resources were reallocated. By mid-2023, data quality collapsed so badly that the ONS suspended publication.

"This data is essential for guiding the big decisions in public life… If this data is useless, we are flailing around… with our eyes shut."
— Tim Harford [24:44]

• Current Situation:

  • Experts now consider LFS data “more or less unusable.”
  • Data on crucial sub-groups (like young people’s employment) is especially unreliable.

  "Most economists at the moment think it is more or less unusable."
  — Delphine Strauss [27:32]

  "With the overall sample size of the labour force survey falling over time, that just means it's getting more and more difficult to look at smaller groups."
  — Hannah Slaughter, Resolution Foundation [28:55]

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Segment 4: Myths about UK Housing Stock

[30:06–30:39]

• Claim: The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe.

• Short and definitive answer:

  "Yes, we do have the oldest housing stock in Europe."
  — Delphine Strauss [30:36]

• More detail promised for an upcoming episode.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On welfare cost increases:

  "That is up about a third in four years. And those numbers do adjust for inflation."
  — Tim Harford [02:09]

• On international comparisons:

  "No other country's seen anything remotely like that."
  — Tom Waters [05:22]

• On statistical pitfalls:

  "Not all statistics are equal... we spend much of our time chasing down the spurious, the flaky and the downright wrong."
  — Tim Harford [22:36]

• On debunking social media prison myths:

  "This is not a fact. The UK does not have more people in jail than Russia because they spoke what they thought was right or had an interest online."
  — Lizzie McNeil [20:48]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:45 – Introduction to welfare debate and benefit claims
• 04:09 – Mental vs. physical health as drivers of disability benefits (Tom Waters)
• 05:06 – International context for benefit claim spikes
• 06:16 – Motability scheme and generosity theory debunked
• 07:19 – Evidence for worsening health and mental health specifics
• 09:20 – Young people disproportionately affected
• 12:30 – Social media jail claims examined
• 15:48 – Actual outcomes: arrests, not prison sentences
• 17:09 – Freedom House data on UK vs. Russia
• 24:10 – The crisis in Labour Force Survey reliability begins
• 27:32 – Economists lose faith in LFS data
• 30:06 – UK housing stock age claim addressed

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Conclusion

This episode of More or Less expertly unravels complex and emotive issues, grounding discussions in solid statistical scrutiny and expert testimony. The show highlights just how challenging it can be to interpret changes in health and welfare data, the perils of international comparisons, and the dangers of misreading statistics for political ends. If you want a reality check on headlines and social media claims, this episode delivers.

Transcript

[Tim Harford]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.

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[Delphine Strauss]

BBC.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Sounds music radio Podcasts hello and welcome.

[Tim Harford]

To More or Less with me, Tim Harford. As the dark days of winter recede, the team and I have emerged from our burrow, hungry for facts and blinking in the light of statistical spring this week. Is it true that the UK imprisons more people for their social media posts than Russia does? Is the UK's housing stock the oldest in Europe, One of the country's most important data sources has been falling apart, which seems bad. But first, the last few days have been filled with a frenzied discussion of spending on welfare as the government has announced a slew of changes to the system. And the area that's come under closest scrutiny is spending on health related benefits for people of working age, and loyal listeners have asked us to dig into the figures. Much of the discussion has centred around the rising cost of providing these benefits, and it is true that this cost has risen sharply to 48 billion pounds last financial year from 36 billion pounds in 2019 2020, just before the pandemic. That is up about a third in four years. And those numbers do Adjust for inflation. There are two basic forms of working age health related benefits. First, incapacity benefit. They are to support people with a condition that prevents them from working. Then there's disability benefits which compensate for the cost of support or other higher living costs. Most of this is in the form of personal independence payments or pip. The increase in the cost of working age health related benefits is more or less evenly split between disability and incapacity benefits. And the immediate cause is that more people are claiming one or both of these benefits. In England and Wales, between 2019 and 2024, disability benefits cases climbed from 2 to 2.9 million, while incapacity benefit cases went from 2.1 to 3 million. For each category, that's an increase of almost a million cases. What about the reasons for these claims? Tom Waters is an Associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and has written a recent paper on these figures. Disability benefits are better documented.

[Tom Waters]

So the increase in number of people getting disability benefits since the pandemic, a bit more than half of it is accounted for by mental behavioural problems, but the other half, about 45%, is accounted for by people getting it for physical reasons.

[Tim Harford]

Unfortunately, we can't do the same analysis for incapacity benefits because the condition that's being claimed for isn't recorded in the data. But now for the big question. Why are more working age people claiming these benefits?

[Tom Waters]

The truth is, no one really knows. There's several hypotheses you might think about. You might think that the cost of living crisis perhaps has something to do with it. So perhaps when people's real incomes fall, when the cost of living crisis, when prices go up, people who might be eligible for these benefits before but weren't claiming them, they might look to find another way to increase their income. So they start claiming. That might be another hypothesis.

[Tim Harford]

Interesting theory. What does the evidence say?

[Tom Waters]

One thing I think is useful in thinking about this is to look at the international evidence. So we looked at about 10 or 12, so other well off countries and tried to collect data on their disability benefits and equivalence. And basically this is a UK phenomenon. So most countries have seen no change, sometimes small decrease, sometimes a small increase in the number of people getting these benefits since the pandemic. Whereas in the UK we're seeing increases on the order of, depending what time period you're talking about, 30%, 40% rises. No other country's seen anything remotely like that. Now of course, all other countries had Covid, all these countries would have seen really sharp increases in inflation. And so that seems that it can't be just something just as simple as something resulting from COVID or something resulting from the cost of living crisis that driving these numbers up.

[Tim Harford]

What about other incentives? One claim that's been doing the rounds is that a car leasing scheme called Motability might be contributing to the increase. It's a scheme open to some recipients of disability benefits who give up part of their benefit to pay for it. Almost one in five new cars are bought by the motability scheme and then leased out.

[Tom Waters]

So in order to get the motability scheme, you have to get a component of personal independence payment called the enhanced mobility component. And about. About half of PIP claimants get the enhanced mobility component. And that was about the same before the pandemic. So what that means is the number of people who'd be eligible for motability has increased at about the same pace as the number of PIP claimants who aren't eligible for motability. And of course, motability scheme, it was available before the pandemic, so the incentive in that sense was already there. And so it's a little bit harder to see how that could account for the really sharp rise that we've seen lately.

[Tim Harford]

It's a similar story for the theory that people might be claiming incapacity or disability benefits because they're more generous than other benefits. They were already more generous before the pandemic, so it can't explain the sharp rise we've seen since. So maybe we're just less healthy. What evidence do we have that the health of the population is getting worse?

[Tom Waters]

So it's pretty tricky. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, the quality of the main surveys that we rely upon has worsened quite considerably. And so that means it's difficult to have a really consistent measure of people's health over time. And if you look in different surveys and look at how many working age people have a long term health condition, you can get different answers from different surveys. What we do see that is consistent in the surveys is that there's more people who have a mental health problem and we see some other external evidence for that as well. So there's more people who are in contact with NHS mental health services since the pandemic, that's gone up really quite rapidly. It's a 36% increase since 2019. That's pretty substantial.

[Tim Harford]

On physical health, the evidence is more mixed. Different surveys tell different stories. We do have some limited evidence from data on sickness absence in the public sector.

[Tom Waters]

So you can look at the number of sickness days taken in different parts of the public sector where we've got good quality administrative data on this. For the nhs, for example, before the pandemic, it was a little bit more than 4% of days were taken on sickness. So any given day, about 4% of NHS staff were on a sickness absence. That's gone up to about 5% in the latest data. We can see increases as well in the civil service and teachers, but for the NHS specifically, we can actually see whether these sick days are for mental problems or for physical health problems. And we've seen an increase in both of them at about a similar rate, as that does provide some external evidence of a worsening in broader health issues.

[Tim Harford]

We've just made a special episode of More or Less about the impact of lockdowns on young people. And one of the things that we found is that whether or not it's anything to do with lockdowns, the mental health of young people seems to have markedly deteriorated over the last few years. That presumably would show up in an increase in young people claiming these working age benefits. Any evidence of that in the data?

[Tom Waters]

That's right. So for young people, there has been a faster increase in getting these benefits than for older people. So to give you a little bit of a sense of scale, a 20 year old today is about as likely to claim one of these benefits as a 39 year old was back in 2019. So there's been an increase across the board. All ages have become more likely to claim these benefits, but they've been faster, particularly fast for younger people. So about 6 to 7% of people in their 20s are claiming, and most young people on disability benefits get it for mental and behavioral problems. About three quarters of 20 year olds, for example, get it for mental and behavioral problems. And there has been a shift towards claiming for mental problems, but that's actually been the same, pretty similar at all ages. So even older people have become more likely to claim for mental health reasons.

[Tim Harford]

Our thanks to Tom Waters from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. You're listening to More or Less. Just a quick reminder now of our back catalogue of statistical sleuthery that is, as ever, available on BBC Sounds. And this isn't a general plug, it's targeted advertising specifically directed at you, Professor Sir Sam Etherington. So Sam is a London GP who appeared on the Today programme earlier this week and said this GPS are completely overwhelmed now. So you've got something like 30 million consultations a month in general practice, way up from pre Covid. That's nearly half the population of this country. Are going to their GPS in a month period. As Sir Sam would know if he had been listening in January 2024, this claim is justifiable, but very likely be misunderstood. While it is true that There are around 30 million appointments in GP surgeries per month, only about 45% are with GPs. The rest are other appointments, such as blood tests done by nurses, and they are certainly not with 30 million individual people. And as Charlotte MacDonald specifically told us all in January 2024, they are not with half the population of the UK. These are individual appointments and if you're really ill, you might make lots of appointments in a month. As Becky Baird from the King's Fund told us at the time, GP super users take up a big proportion of those appointments.

[Delphine Strauss]

A large study did show that frequent attenders, the top 10% of them, that people are going, make up about four in every 10 consultations in England.

[Tim Harford]

If you like Sir Sam, are planning to go on the Today programme and or even just to listen to it, consider subscribing to the More or less podcast to guard against confusion and other forms of statistical misfortune. On 18 February, BBC News Night's Victoria Derbyshire was left flummoxed by this claim from Carla Sands, who was the ambassador to Denmark under President Trump's first administration.

[Lizzie McNeil]

There are more people in jail in the UK because they spoke what they thought was right or they had interest online than there are in all of Russia.

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[Tim Harford]

You'Ve got that from. Carla Sanz's claim is similar to those made by The Vice President, J.D. vance at the Munich Security Conference and by the President's right hand man, Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast.

[Tom Waters]

Several thousand people have been given prison sentences in the UK for social media posts where there was no explicit link to actual violence.

[Tim Harford]

On a separate occasion, Joe Rogan claimed that there's something like 4,000 people have been arrested in England for thought crimes, where they've said things online that people find to be a hateful thing or a problematic thing. And I think it's only 200 in Russia. If you say it enough times, it must be true. Right? Right. Well, obviously not. We got our policing people's thoughts, prayers and Twitter Feeds correspondent Lizzie McNeil on the case. Hello, Lizz.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Well, first things first, Carla's statement was a bit vague, wasn't it?

[Tim Harford]

Yes. There are more people in jail in the UK because they spoke what they thought was right or they had interest online than there are in all of Russia.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Yeah. So I asked her what she meant and whether she had any examples or where she got her information from.

[Tim Harford]

Good. Was she helpful?

[Lizzie McNeil]

She was concise.

[Tim Harford]

But was she helpful?

[Lizzie McNeil]

She was concise, Tim. Here's her email info. Hi, Lizzie. It's a fact and you can research it. Best regards, Carla Sands.

[Tim Harford]

Well, it's nice to have permission. I take it you did indeed research it.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Oh, yeah, I've researched the heck out of it. The claim seems to have first started floating around in a slightly different guise on the Webersphere in December 2022, via a tweet which claimed that apparently last.

[Tim Harford]

Year, 400 people were arrested in Russia for social media posts. Shocking authoritarianism. Yet 3,300 people were arrested in the UK for social media posts. Right, so already we have different numbers and different fates. So being arrested versus being jailed and different acts, social media posts, or speaking what they thought was right or thought crimes. It's all a bit messy.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Yeah. And I'm here to tidy up, Tim. Never fear. Both of These figures, the 400 in Russia and the 3,300 in the UK, refer to 2017 and are not talking about the same thing. The UK figure referred to the number of arrests made under section 127 of the Communications act, specifically online malicious communications.

[Tim Harford]

That sounds like social media posts to me.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Some of them will be. For example, they might include tweets or Facebook posts attacking what is called a protected characteristic, such as race, religion or sexual orientation. And if you're a free speech fundamentalist, then maybe being arrested for a racial slur might be equated to being arrested for a fort crime. But online malicious communications also include threats and intimidation.

[Tim Harford]

Okay, so these aren't just people who spoke what they thought was right. Can we clear up this slippage between the number of arrests and the number of people being imprisoned?

[Lizzie McNeil]

It definitely wasn't 3,300 people imprisoned. We know that nearly 1,700 were convicted, but we don't know how many of them were imprisoned. These types of crimes commonly receive sentences like fines, community service, restraining orders and being made to pay compensation to the victim. People generally only receive jail sentences under the most extreme cases that are judged to have intentional targeting of vulnerable individuals.

[Delphine Strauss]

Prolonged or repetitive behaviour, premeditation, or the use of technology to avoid detection.

[Tim Harford]

What about the Russian figure of 400 people?

[Lizzie McNeil]

That's also from 2017. But unlike the UK figure, which was centred around arrests, this one was taken from data about criminal proceedings. The figure comes from a report by Agora, which is a Russian human rights group and NGO they found that criminal proceedings were brought against 411 Internet users.

[Tim Harford]

So why were they being prosecuted?

[Lizzie McNeil]

For very different reasons than people in the uk, including posting online criticisms of the Russian government and promoting homosexuality. Also, things that are nothing to do with what you say or write, but what you read. For example, reading the BBC website or other websites banned by the Russian state, or accessing a website that discusses LGBTQ issues.

[Tim Harford]

So not like the UK at all.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Nope. Shockingly, it turns out Russia has way more restrictions on freedoms than the UK does. I looked at the most recent reports by Freedom House, a non profit organization based in Washington D.C. that advocates for democracy, political freedom and human rights. Unfortunately, they didn't want to put anyone up for interview right now, but they did send me their most recent findings.

[Tim Harford]

Which were?

[Lizzie McNeil]

Well, they actually rate countries freedom scores by looking at things like government surveillance, access to the web, limitations to content and violations of user rights. The UK got a score of 78 out of 100. Russia got a score of 20 out of 100. And this hits on one of the key issues with trying to compare countries like the UK to countries like Russia. Russia operates in a clandestine way. We do not have reliable data on election results, let alone on who they're imprisoning. We know that children as young as seven were arrested for laying flowers at the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow. We know that political opponents are arrested on trumped up charges. We know Jehovah's Witnesses have been banned from practicing their faith and many are currently imprisoned. But we don't know how many people have been arrested for social media posts, because part of the way that Russia operates is by keeping people in the dark.

[Tim Harford]

Well, thank you, Lizzie. Can we talk about some of the more recent cases? The statistical claim seems to refer to 2017, but I know a lot of the excitement in the US concerns people who were imprisoned after the riots in the summer of 2024.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Mostly people went to jail, not for what they said or wrote, but for arson, attacking police, attacking people's houses, or trying to break into and attack migrant centres. But there were some people who were jailed for posting things online. Some were racist things, others were inciting violence. Things like starting a Facebook group called Bring the Riots to Cardiff and posting things like Let's f ing riot. This was during a time when the government was trying to stop the spread of the riots by throwing the book at people who broke the law.

[Tim Harford]

So it doesn't seem quite right to describe all these cases as being about saying what they thought was right or that they had interest online no, it doesn't, does it?

[Lizzie McNeil]

It's not clear if Carla Sands, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and J.D. vance are familiar with the details of all these cases, but what they're insinuating is that people are being arrested just for what they believe in. This is widely known as being a prisoner of conscience. I spoke to the human rights organisation Amnesty International about this because they're the ones that originated the phrase.

[Tim Harford]

They told me that people and organizations have different criteria for what counts as a prisoner of conscience, political prisoner or similar terms. Prisoner of conscience is an Amnesty term and we have a process and criteria for defining. One of the things that we establish in this process is that someone has not used violence or advocated violence or hatred in the circumstances leading to their.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Detention, which would clearly exclude those riot cases.

[Tim Harford]

People do not have a human right to engage in or incite racist violence, and so their imprisonment for doing so is not a matter of their conscience being violated. Okay, so those cases maybe shouldn't count. And I'm also guessing that when it comes to prisoners of conscience, Russia does indeed have some.

[Lizzie McNeil]

Yeah. Amnesty told me that while they didn't calculate the number of prisoners of conscience in Russia, another organisation, the Memorial Human Rights Group, counts something similar to.

[Tim Harford]

They found that as of today, 437 individuals are imprisoned on political grounds, 432 on religious grounds, and an additional 586 people are politically persecuted but remain outside of prison.

[Lizzie McNeil]

So all in all, this is not a fact. The UK does not have more people in jail than Russia because they spoke what they thought was right or had an interest online.

[Tim Harford]

Thank you, Lizzie. You did indeed research it. You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.

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[Tim Harford]

As we well know on more or less, not all statistics are equal. We've come across our fair share of flimsy claims spun together by PR companies using sample sizes smaller than our last team building. Karaoke Night. Anything by Kraftwerk? Since you ask, yes. We spend much of our time chasing down the spurious, the flaky and the downright wrong. So often we breathe a sigh of relief when we turn to data from the Office for National Statistics. ONS has often been a byword for trusted or reliable. That's how it's meant to work. But for nearly two years now, one of the ONS's flagship publications, the Labour Force Survey, has been in deep trouble. This survey, which is meant to provide us with some of the most basic economic data, such as the employment rate, has been deeply unreliable, so much so that the ONS even suspended the publication of new data for four months. This news may not be the stuff of tabloid front pages, but for those working on economic policy, making important decisions without a reliable labour Force survey feels like driving with your eyes shut. Delphine Strauss is economics correspondent at the Financial Times, and she's been following this sorry saga since the beginning. She remembers when the Labour Force Survey was in better health, so in happier times.

[Delphine Strauss]

It used to be far and away the most detailed and authoritative set of data that we had on what's going on in the UK jobs market. It's super important for the bank of England to understand what's going on in the dynamics that drive inflation. It's important for policymakers in central government if they want to know not just how many people are in work and out of work, but also, do we have good jobs? Do we have the kind of jobs people want? You know, are they productive? Are they fulfilling? Are they flexible enough?

[Tim Harford]

This is not small potatoes. This is big fat jacket potatoes with baked beans and cheese. This data is essential for guiding the big decisions in public life, such as whether to increase interest rates or what kind of employment policies to introduce. If this data is useless, we are flailing around with well Sorry to repeat myself, but with our eyes shut, but how did we get here?

[Delphine Strauss]

The response rate to the Labour Force Survey has been falling very gradually for many years, more than a decade. And that's the same with most surveys, most surveys of households in most countries. But that was for a long time seen as a sort of, you know, building long term problem, not an immediate crisis. There was huge disruption at the start of COVID when they had to switch from face to face to phone interviews. And the ONS knew in 2020 that that was leading to some issues, that it wasn't just harder to reach people, it was also that they were getting a different mix of people answering the survey. Fewer renters, fewer people from deprived areas, slightly different mix of nationalities and age groups. And they tried to adjust for that and they put more interviewers into the field, especially in the areas where they weren't getting enough responses and things did stabilise to a certain degree.

[Tim Harford]

But in the middle of 2023, the ONS made a fateful mistake.

[Delphine Strauss]

The ONS was trying to do two things at once. It was trying to keep the old labour force survey running, but it was also trying to develop and test and ramp up this new survey called the Transformed Labour Force Survey, which is meant to be the ultimate answer to all of these problems of falling response rates to be done online, supposed to be quicker and easier to fill in and give you all of the detail you want.

[Tim Harford]

Under pressure to cut costs, the ONS had made significant cuts to its survey's budget and was juggling resources. And at this point it decided to pull resources off the existing labour force survey and put them into the development of its prototype, Transformed Labour Force Survey. The effect on the existing labour force survey was not wholly positive.

[Delphine Strauss]

They had a very big sudden problem and the response rates dipped a lot. And it was in the summer of 2023 when they came to process the results from that, they saw that they had some numbers that couldn't possibly be right. And so that was when they realised they couldn't publish the numbers and had to sort of do a crisis management job.

[Tim Harford]

So there was this crisis moment for the labour force survey in the summer of 2023. I mean, has that been fixed? Do policymakers now trust the Labour force survey or is it as bad as ever?

[Delphine Strauss]

No, most economists at the moment think it is more or less unusable.

[Tim Harford]

I mean, unusable, that sounds pretty bad. So the basic top line numbers coming from the labour force survey, people who know what they're talking about do not trust them.

[Delphine Strauss]

That's correct.

[Tim Harford]

The quality has improved since its nadir in late 2023 when the ONS had to pause publication. But perhaps this isn't saying much. And while the top level figures are questionable, things are even worse when you go below that. You might remember much discussion in the last couple of years about a crisis of economic inactivity following the pandemic with many people in their 50s and 60s and leaving the workforce. Well, it looks like that might have been a statistical mirage created by the misfiring Labour Force Survey. We hit this problem ourselves. Earlier in the week we made a special edition of More or Less Looking at the effect of the lockdown on young people. One of the questions we wanted to answer was what has been the long term impact of lockdowns on young people's job prospects? That should be a fairly straightforward question for the Labour Force Survey to answer. And. But it's become so unreliable that in the end our answer was basically, we don't know. This is Hannah Slaughter, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.

[Delphine Strauss]

With the overall sample size of the labour force survey falling over time, that just means it's getting more and more difficult to look at smaller groups. So for example, one of the groups we're particularly interested in is young people. We know that there are rising problems with young people's mental health and it's important to understand how that's impacted employment and that just becomes more and more difficult as the overall sample decreases.

[Tim Harford]

At this point you are probably wondering what the ons have to say about this. So are we. We have invited them on the programme more than once, but they've told us they have nothing more to add before their next update on the labour force survey in April. What about the so called transformed labour force survey meant to replace the labour force survey? It looks like that could be as late as 2027, over four years since the original problems became apparent. You're listening to more or less one of our loyal listeners. Colin has heard a claim which he finds very surprising. We've got the oldest housing stock in Europe.

[Delphine Strauss]

In this country.

[Tim Harford]

Having lived and worked and also holidayed in Europe, I cannot see the justification for the claim. That's fair, Colin. I've visited Rome too. Some of it looks pretty ancient to me, but do go on. The question is, what is old? Is the word old being used in a pejorative sense? Old houses can be better than new ones. I hope that you can get your teeth into this question. Well, here we are and we're going to have a go at Just that. Does the UK have the oldest housing stock in Europe?

[Delphine Strauss]

Yes, we do have the oldest housing stock in Europe.

[Tim Harford]

Well, that settles that. And that's really all we have time for this week. But if you're curious to go into that item in more detail, we will return to the topic next week. Please keep your questions and comments coming in to more or lessbc.co.uk. until next week. Goodbye. More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles with Nathan Gower, Lizzie McNeil and Charlotte MacDonald. The production coordinator was Brenda Brown. The programme was mixed and recorded by James Beard and our editor is Richard Varden.

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[Delphine Strauss]

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[Lizzie McNeil]

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[Tim Harford]

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[Tim Harford]

This is the story of the One. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here? And maybe how to head them off at the pass that's on the media specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.