Fiona writes about the economy. She builds her own spreadsheets and trusts them slightly more than anyone quoting someone else's.
public finances
July is supposed to be the good month. Self-assessment taxpayers settle up by the 31st, HMRC banks the windfall, and for four weeks a year the public finances look almost respectable. This July, provisional ONS figures put self-assessment receipts at a record £17.1 billion, the highest July haul since
party funding
Here is the number nobody at Westminster wants to sit with for longer than a news cycle: £164,347. That is what Lord Sainsbury gave Andy Burnham in the four months before he became Prime Minister, and it is not, whatever the Labour press office would like you to hear,
welfare
Somewhere in Clacton-on-Sea this week, a Personal Independence Payment claimant either opened a brown envelope or didn't, because most people stop reading DWP letters until the money stops arriving. Nigel Farage's own constituency has one of the highest concentrations of PIP claimants in the country. His
Reform UK
Danny Kruger, Reform's work and pensions spokesman, went on BBC Breakfast this week to explain how his party would fund £50bn of welfare cuts, and somewhere in the answer he conceded that Brussels might retaliate by cutting off British pensioners in Spain and France. "I'd
On the day it emerged that the men's prison estate in England and Wales had 83 spare cells left, eighty-three, in a system holding roughly 87,000 people, which is the margin of a coin toss dressed up as a policy, Estonia's justice minister was explaining,
housing
England needs roughly 300,000 new homes a year to keep pace with demand, has managed it exactly once since 1969, and last year the total came in around 170,000 — a shortfall the trade press reports and the political class shrugs at. Every time a local scheme collapses, the
On Thursday morning a communications centre in Manchester lost power for ninety seconds. By the time it came back, trains across the north-west were stacked up, cancelled or simply not arriving, and Greater Manchester's Bee Network had opened its buses and trams to anyone waving a rail ticket,
immigration enforcement
Immigration Enforcement carried out more than 17,400 raids on British workplaces between July 2024 and the end of last year — nail bars, barbers, car washes, takeaways — and the Home Office wants you to know this is a triumph. Two separate press releases in January, one trailing the other by
A housing options officer in Rochdale — call her Sandra, because there will be a Sandra, there always is — will one day be asked to establish the nationality status of every tenant on her caseload, cross-reference it against EU settlement records, issue notice to quit within six months to anyone who
quangos
Ofgem announced the new price cap on 27 August last year, live on its website, no vote, no debate, no minister at a despatch box explaining themselves — and eleven million households found out what their winter would cost from a press release. The board that decided it is appointed, not
energy
On Friday, BP announced it is ending more than sixty years of North Sea production, putting five hubs, around 1,100 jobs and roughly 117,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day up for sale to whichever company fancies them. Chief executive Meg O'Neill called it a matter
devolution
Central government in this country collects more than 90p of every pound raised in tax. The OECD average is 53p. Britain is not merely centralised, it is an outlier among outliers, the kind of number that should embarrass a Treasury official into silence at a dinner party and somehow never