A miscellany of factual or fact-like material from both Houses of Parliament, largely from the week just gone. (NB: For reference, HC plus a number indicates the House of Commons document number).
LET US REMEMBER THEM
Annual Report and Accounts: The Clerk of the Commons’ total remuneration package is between £270,000 and £275,000 a year. The average salary of House staff is £42,483. Total cost of House staff: £156 million.
HC 37: Issues of poor air quality are often highly-localised: the 31 non-compliant sections of the Strategic Road Network represent about 51 miles of road out of the 4,500 managed by National Highways.
Viscount Younger of Leckie: A typical NHS nurse will retire after 30 years with a pension worth over £24,000 per year in today’s money. This compares quite favorably to a private sector employee with similar earnings receiving less than £10,000.
Lord Sikka: My colleagues have sent regulatory bodies 10,000 pages of evidence to show that banks are forging customers’ signatures to repossess their homes and businesses, yet we have seen no action of any kind.
EDM 506 concerns the regulation of loot boxes in video games.
National Audit Office HC 851: Since April 2020, DVLA largely paused work on paper-based license applications as staff were unable to process these from home.
Siobhain McDonagh: A quarter of children on free school meals did less than one hour’s schoolwork a day. While approximately 30% of private school pupils attended four or more online lessons per day during the first lockdown, just 6.3% of state school pupils did the same.
Bob Stewart: Since 1990, Yemen has gone from bad to worse.
Martin Vickers: No government money was spent on religious education projects in schools between 2016 and 2021. By way of comparison, during this time English has received £28.5 million, Music £387 million, Maths £154 million and Science £56 million
Jack Brereton: Monkey Dust is a new psychoactive substance that is a stimulant that can make the user euphoric or hallucinate, lose control of their body, become aggressive and/or fall into a deep depression. It is a fine, off-white powder costing £10 to £15 per gram with only 3mg needed for a hit, making it cheaper than alcohol.
Tony Lloyd: There are around 132,000 vacancies in our National Health Service.
Lord Young of Cookham: In September this year Rightmove reported annual growth in rent of 12.3%
Lord Sharpe of Epsom: HS2 estimates that sustained protest action has led to additional costs to the project of more than £146 million – an amount projected to rise to £200 million by the end of next year.
Lord Markham: Since we removed the cap on visas from people all around the world in 2019, the number of those who have joined the NHS has gone up from 25,000 a year to 48,000 a year – largely from Commonwealth countries.
Lord Austin of Dudley: The UK now has the smallest Armed Forces it has had at any point since the Napoleonic wars.
Baroness Blower: The poorest 10% of household pay 47.6% of their gross income in direct and indirect taxes, compared with 33.5% paid by the richest 10%
Lord Paddick: The average public sector pay increase is running at 3% while in the private sector it is running at 7%.
Lord Benyon: New targets will require water companies to secure the largest infrastructure program in water company history: £56 billion of capital investment over the next 25 years.
Lord Dodds (DUP): The government will have spent £340 million through the Trader Support Service helping traders process 2.3 million customs declarations for trade between two parts of the United Kingdom. According to some estimates it could amount to £500 million.
HC39: Firms bidding for government contracts worth over £5 million are required to report five categories of Scope 3 emissions (in total there are 15 categories of Scope 3 emissions).
Baroness Kramer: The oil and gas sector has in just this quarter paid out $29 billion to shareholders.
Baroness Brenton: Social care vacancies increased to 165,000 in July (an increase of over 50% on the previous year).
Baroness Merton: In 2021-22 there were 24.4 million attendances at A&E across England, compared with 21.5 million 10 years before.
Lord Foster of Bath: BBC services reach 492 million people a week making it the world’s largest broadcaster by reach.
Kemi Badenoch: In 2020 the UK exported £821 million worth of offshore wind products.
Andrew Bowie: British business exported £344.6 billion-worth of goods and services to Europe in the year ending June 2022
Greg Hands: Over the 2021–22 financial year we removed 192 barriers to UK agricultural produce across 79 countries.
Maria Caulfield: We are investing record levels of funding in mental health services – £2.3 billion annually.
Bob Blackman: (One of the ‘must-dos) Increasing investment by £125 million a year to fund the measures needed to deliver smoke-free 2030. The Khan review estimates that it will take until 2047 for the smoking rates in disadvantaged communities to reach the smoke free ambition of 5% or less
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Shelter commissioned research to show that some 230,000 private tenants have been served with section 21 notices since 2019.
HC12: Fraud accounts for 40% of all crime yet receives only around 2% of police funding.
HC100: Nano-satellites are the size of a toaster.
AND FINALLY: UNRELIABLE STATISTICS
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C may save around 520 million people from frequent exposure to heat waves.
University College London issued warnings about the world’s financial system which is set to lose 37% of global GDP by the end of the century as a result of the climate crisis.
A recent University of Oxford report states that if we move to a decarbonized energy sector by 2050, the planet will save $12 trillion.
