Ashwin Kumar

Personally, I think the London Science Museum has always been really poor: over some years, we've taken our daughter to science museums in Copenhagen, Paris, Athens, Boston, Glasgow - and loved them - all better for narrative, explanation of the underlying science - more interesting for her (and us)

💰 Are tax rises inevitable?

It all depends on the OBR forecast, says @ashwin-kumar.bsky.social. A lot of the current speculation is premature, and based on the most negative possible outlook.

The DWP (and I think HMRC) had a major statistics hub in Newcastle (at Longbenton) and so would have made a much more sensible relocation than Newport. Would have allowed movement between organisations as part of career progression

A line chart showing the global number of people living in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as living below the International Poverty Line (IPL), which is $2.15 per day in 2017 prices (shown as a red line on the chart) and $3 per day in 2021 prices (shown as a blue line). 125 million people who would not have been counted as extremely poor before June 2025 (when the IPL was raised to $3 per day) are now included. This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries. The data source is the World Bank (2024 and 2025). The chart is CC BY Our World in Data.

✍️ New article: “$3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty. What changed, and why?” 🧵

Today's interest rate cut by the Bank of England is welcome but comes too late - the Bank has kept rates too high for too long, while essential costs remain high and households continue to struggle. Immediate government action is needed to address cost of living www.ippr.org/media-office...

Quite a big deal that the BoE has revised productivity up. --> Risks have diminished as new analysis shows "potential productivity is now more explicable by [past] shocks", and Bank staff judge "some of the weakness in the headline data has been overstated".

Lowers pressure on the OBR to downgrade.

It's actually quite mad how poorly taxed gambling is. Great proposal by IPPR colleagues on how to fix this, and how the proceeds could be used to tackle child poverty.

We don't really have a definitive explanation for inactivity being higher than pre-pandemic. Other possible explanations include healthcare backlogs so more people too ill to work or that, post-pandemic, more people decided to accept a lower income in return for more time with their grandkids

But it is VERY far from a jobs crisis (as one journalist put to me in an interview this afternoon). 🧵 /end

Finally, average wage growth has slowed to 5% a year. This is still comfortably above price growth (inflation) but by slightly less so. This is evidence of a degree of restraint from employers as they deal with minimum wage rises and employer national insurance increases. 🧵 /11

So we have two contradictory pictures: employment up according to the Labour Force Survey but number of employees down according to HMRC data: that’s the key info to report, not the unemployment rate whose importance depends on what’s happened to inactivity/employment. 🧵 /10

So they recommend looking at stats on the number of employees reported by their employers to HMRC for shorter-term trends. This shows a small fall in the number of employees in the most recent period. 🧵 /9

But – yes there is a but – there have been problems with the Labour Force Survey in recent years. Not enough people have responded to the survey, increasing uncertainty around its results. The ONS have been working on this but short-term comparisons still suffer from volatility. 🧵 /8

Because of these complexities, the unemployment rate should NOT be the focus of reporting every month – the employment rate is much more useful. What matters most is if people are working, not how hard they are trying to find work, which is what the unemployment rate measures. 🧵 /7

Essentially, according to the Labour Force Survey, the rise in unemployment came from a drop in inactivity, not a drop in employment. If more people who were previously not doing so start looking for work, that’s a good thing. 🧵 /6

When you do this, despite unemployment rising a bit, the Labour Force Survey employment rate rose a bit as well. How is this possible? Because the inactivity rate fell quite a bit – by 0.4 percentage points. 🧵 /5

That’s why the government has made a priority of supporting people who are classified as ‘inactive’ to look for work. So, reporting of the monthly labour market stats should NOT focus just on the unemployment rate but on the employment rate so that the inactivity issue doesn’t get ignored 🧵 /4

It is a more serious problem for the economy if people have health problems or believe there are no jobs and stop looking for work. This ‘inactivity’ is much higher in poorer performing labour markets – e.g. 28% in the North-East of England compared to 17% in the South West. 🧵 /3

Statisticians use three labour market categories: 1. In work (in employment), 2. Out of work and looking for a job (unemployed), and 3. Out of work and not looking (inactive). 🧵 /2

Today's stories saying the unemployment rate has risen from 4.6 to 4.7% tell only part of the story. The same data - the Labour Force Survey - shows this rise comes from more people who were inactive starting to look for work and so being classified as unemployed, which is good news 🧵 /1

UK inflation hits highest for almost a year and a half Food prices rose more quickly while fuel fell only slightly, boosting the overall rate of inflation.

Today inflation figures mean that food costs are up 36% over the last four years. It's people on the lowest incomes who will feel this hardest as food occupies much a higher proportion of their weekly budget. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Peter Apps on X: "If anyone has watched the Netflix documentary on Grenfell and is looking for further reading, I've made all my posts on summarising the inquiry report free to read. Links in the thread below:" / X If anyone has watched the Netflix documentary on Grenfell and is looking for further reading, I've made all my posts on summarising the inquiry report free to read. Links in the thread below:

If anyone has watched the Netflix documentary on Grenfell and is looking for further reading, I've made all my posts summarising the inquiry report free to read.

Links in the thread below (on the bad site)

x.com/PeteApps/sta...

This is a really good and important report. Some thoughts of my own...

Graph comparing grocery price inflation trends with and without scanner data

👏 In rare, but welcome, good news from ONS, they are now using industry scanning data to measure grocery price inflation…
🛒 We should see much more accurate, reliable and granular grocery inflation numbers going forward, and about time too!
www.ons.gov.uk/economy/infl...

❤️‍🩹 | NEW REPORT: Voters want bold action on health – and don’t see it as 'nanny statism'. Our new research with Public First shows that smarter public health policy isn’t just good for the nation – it could be a vote-winner too.

www.ippr.org/articles/the...

Liverpool falls silent to remember the 97 football fans who were unlawfully killed in the Hillsborough disaster 36 years ago today

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Surely main benefit is actually being able to get on the train without forcing yourself on due to ridiculous level of overcrowding in Standard?

Drive-a-GMC-Yukon-round-a-Tuscan-hilltown challenge.

The penguins will greet us as liberators.