Is one in four people in the UK disabled?
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. The team keep telling me there's a constitutional limit on how many series I can present, but I am ploughing on anyway. This week, the Chancellor has given herself £9.9 billion of headroom. What does that mean exactly and how come no matter what happens to the economy, she always seems to have the same amount of headroom?

Is it true that one in four people in the UK is disabled? And if it is true, what does it mean? But first, the 2nd of April will go down in history as Liberation Day. Excellent. What's Liberation Day? This is the beginning of Liberation Day...

Not as much fun as it sounds. Liberation Day, a day which has already changed date at least once, also includes tariffs on imports from countries including... I wonder which country this could be. North Korea? Russia? Mordor? Canada.

Canada, eh? Well, with me to explain the whole slightly bemusing situation is our tariffs being used in mysterious ways correspondent Lizzie McNeill. Hi Lizzie. Hi Tim. Well, all these tariffs have got people in a kerfuffle. Yes. Remind me why they're being implemented again? Well, that is an excellent question. And a question to which you have the answer? Is it maybe to do with the USMCA agreement? The United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement? Yes.

I still think they missed a trick not calling it the United States-Canada-Mexico trade agreement or USCAM. Didn't he say this about it? If I look at some of these agreements, I'd read them at night and I'd say, who would ever sign a thing like this? Ah, yes. The one he negotiated and signed in his first term. That's the one.

Well, we'll let him answer that. No, it's really not on USM. It has nothing to do with that. They've allowed both of them, Canada very much so. They've allowed millions and millions of people to come into our country that shouldn't be here. They could have stopped them, and they didn't. And they've killed 300,000 people last year, my opinion, have been destroyed by drugs, by fentanyl.

The fentanyl coming through Canada is massive. Right. So it's about fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid. Now, I know it's certainly a big problem and a lot of Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses, but is the amount coming through Canada massive? No. The amount of fentanyl seized by US customs at the US-Canada border made up 0.2% of all fentanyl seized in 2024. Right.

Was that the only reason for raising tariffs? No, he moved away from the fentanyl argument sometime around February and instead started focusing on a number. We subsidise them $200 billion a year. It costs us $200 billion a year in subsidy to keep Canada afloat. Why are we supporting a country $200 billion plus a year? They should be a state.

FYI, they do not subsidise Canada. No. I suspect what Trump is referring to here is the trade deficit? Yeah, that's what most people think he's referring to. I mean, he so far hasn't really answered the question, but he has called it a deficit once or twice. Tremendous deficit. So that's what we're going with.

We should remind people that a trade deficit means you're importing more goods and services than you're exporting. And you're paying for it either by borrowing money or by accepting inward investment. So the US gets a lot of that. Every time a foreigner buys shares in Google or Apple, the US is effectively exporting shares to pay for imported goods.

I realise it's all a bit tricky to get your head around, but the bottom line is that trade deficits aren't necessarily a problem. The US has been running a deficit for about 50 years and it remains one of the richest and fastest growing large economies in the world. Yep. Um...

But also, the $200 billion figure is supremely dodgy. If you look at the data from 2024 from the American Census Bureau and Statistics Canada, you can see that there's a $70 billion deficit. That's quite a step down. It is. And that's only including the trade in physical goods, so like cars, maple syrup, lumber. If you take the services Canada buys from the US, things like banking, air transport and Netflix, this deficit shrinks down to around $40 billion. Wow.

And $40 billion isn't a lot of money. The US economy is closing in on $30,000 billion, which puts it into perspective. Yeah, it does. But the thing is, Trump only thinks trade is fair if the US is in a surplus, which isn't really how it all works. So let's talk about Canadian exports. What are they? All sorts of things. But there are a lot of raw materials, such as lumber and in particular crude oil. We don't need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody.

Hmm, Trump sort of has a point there. What about Texas? Cue the music. Yeah, so the US produce 13 million barrels of crude oil every day, but they consume 20 million barrels a day. And Canada provides their crude oil via direct pipeline to the Midwest. We don't need their oil. He says that, but he backtracked on a 25% tariff for oil and energy and dropped it to 10%.

Which would suggest they maybe definitely do need their oil, at least a bit. Just a tad. Now, another reason for introducing tariffs is that he wants the US to start producing everything in-house. We don't need their lumber. We don't need their cars.

Ah yes, cars. Isn't one of the big tariffs on Liberation Day a 25% levy on all cars not made in the US? Yes, and obviously a lot of cars come from countries like Korea, Japan and Germany, but the Canadian, US, Mexican auto industry is incredibly intertwined. As they've enjoyed free trade agreements in the past, production has gone to where it's cheapest and most efficient to manufacture.

For lots of car parts, this is Canada or Mexico, car parts can cross the borders of these three countries anything up to eight times before they're assembled into the finished product. So a 25% tariff is pretty huge. Yeah, if you have to pay a tariff of 25% every time you cross the border and these parts are crossing multiple times, that is really going to add up for manufacturers and for consumers. Yeah, it's estimated that it will push up car prices in the US by...

by $3,000 to $10,000. Plus, the US will have to ramp up production by about 75%, which will mean tens of billions in investment. But if that happens, these tariffs might promote blue-collar jobs in the US. That's certainly what the president's supporters think, including some of the US unions. And they might be right, but one problem is that the tariff policy keeps changing and tariffs are being used as bargaining chips.

If you've really wanted to persuade corporations to relocate to the US, you'd have to be very consistent, and even then it would take quite a long time to build a factory. Another problem is that these tariffs are raising costs for US manufacturing. We've already talked about more expensive crude oil, but Canada provides most of the US car industry's aluminium. Canadian hydroelectric power makes it three times cheaper to smelt aluminium in Canada than it is in the US. It seems like these tariffs are going to hurt everyone.

Yeah, well, Trump is trying to do two things. Bring production back to the US as part of his America First policy and absorb Canada for its natural resources. And these tariffs are being used to pressure them into doing what he wants. Liberation Day indeed. Elbows up. Elbows up. Wait, what does that mean? I have no idea. Thank you, Lizzie.

Last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, stood up to deliver her spring statement. It is essentially an update to her budget of last October. In the autumn, I set out our new fiscal rules that would guide this government...

These fiscal rules are non-negotiable. Both then and last week, she had been keen to stress her commitment to hitting her so-called stability rule. This fiscal rule says that by the financial year 2029-30, so more than four years away, all day-to-day government spending needs to be paid for out of taxation, with borrowing only for investment.

It's a rule aimed at projecting confidence and stability, no doubt with one eye on bond markets, the investors who lend the UK government money, in the hope of not provoking the kind of rise in interest rates that we saw under Liz Truss.

Back in October, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which has the job of independently verifying the government's financial plans, predicted that Rachel Reeves would spend slightly less in four years' time than she was collecting in tax. The difference was £9.9 billion. Or to adopt the political jargon, she had £9.9 billion of headroom.

But since then, things have changed. Higher interest rates from those bond markets and weaker than expected tax receipts left the Chancellor banging her forehead on a slightly lower ceiling. Her headroom fell from £9.9bn to nothing at all, or more precisely, to £4bn in the red. Cue a number of policy changes aimed at saving enough money to get her back into the black, including some contentious reforms to disability benefits.

all of which gave her headroom of, well, wouldn't you know, we are back to £9.9 billion.

To tell us what we should make of this curious coincidence, we turn to friend of the programme, Duncan Weldon. The first thing to say about £9.9 billion is it's not really a very large number in the context of public spending being forecast to be more than £1.5 trillion in four years' time. It's around half a percentage point. It's not a very large number. And it's not a large number relative to public spending

Nor is it a large number relative to previous headroom chancellors have had. So if we go back to 2010, we look at the last 15 or so years, chancellors have usually left themselves more like £25 or £26 billion on average. So it's small relative to public spending, it's small relative to previous amounts of headroom, and it's also eerily familiar. Do you think that was deliberate, to hit it absolutely on the nail? Well, it feels like a

a bit too far to be a coincidence doesn't it to get back to exactly 9.9 billion it looks like the chancellor sat down with her team said I want to show the stability rule is stable almost I want to show there's been no deterioration in the public finances and the measures have been a

back and forth process with the Office of Budget Responsibility until they got back to this £9.9 billion. The best evidence that she was deliberately targeting £9.9 comes from if we look at what was happening with welfare policy in the run-up to the budget. So we had the first

Big round of welfare policy changes. It seems that the Office of Budget Responsibility said that was going to save a bit less than the Treasury intended. So at the last moment, we got an extra £500 million of welfare cuts just in the days before the statement.

So you could interpret that as, OK, the Office of Budget Responsibility was going to say that the headroom had shrunk to £9.4 billion. So they found and rustled up another £500 million of welfare cuts to get it exactly back to £9.9. It is strange because this is a forecast. It's four years out. It's going to change again and again. So who is she trying to impress with this?

That's a very good question. You know, you say it's a number four years out. Tim, I don't know if you forecast exactly what your income and expenditure will be in four years' time. And, you know, it's certainly not easy to do that. You know, I think politically she wanted to show she was firmly sticking to her rules and, you know, not giving up headroom. She wanted to show the markets there was no deterioration in the UK's underlying budget position. But what we've ended up here is, you know, something called the stability rule.

which actually makes our public finances and public policy less stable because these forecasts are going to change twice a year and it's a ridiculous way to be setting public spending, to be thinking about welfare policy, to be thinking about anything else, to be chopping and changing and tweaking the numbers every five or six months because a forecast of what things are going to be like in four years time has changed.

You can't have stability if you're constantly chasing a model, chasing the forecast. I've heard this phrase, chasing the model, before. Tell me a bit more about that. In an ideal world, the government would set welfare policy with an idea of how much it wants to spend and what it wants to achieve with that welfare policy. It would set public spending with an idea of what level of funding it thinks public services will

require and how much tax the public are prepared to take on to pay for those public services. But that's not what we're having here. The end result that they're targeting is a number thrown out by a forecast. So as the forecast changes by very, very small amounts,

because they have so little headroom. If the forecasts change, the headroom gets wiped out. So the policy has to change, not to change something in the real world, but to make the forecast numbers look better because no one really thinks there is going to be headroom of £9.9 billion in 2029-30 because an awful lot is going to change between now and 2029-30.

interest rates could continue to rise higher, adding to government borrowing costs, adding to debt interest, eating up the headroom. Secondly, there's the whole global economic trading system. Donald Trump is pressing ahead with tariffs. At the time of the Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts, it was unclear how that would play out. But there is a serious risk that global economic growth is materially slower. That's bad for the public finances.

Our thanks to Duncan Weldon, economist and author of 200 Years of Muddling Through the Surprising Story of the British Economy.

And if you want to learn more about how and why bond markets can derail a government's spending plans, Duncan is presenting a special documentary on the topic. Break open those Easter eggs and gather round the radio to listen to Of Budgets and Bond Markets on Sunday 20th April, 1.30pm on Radio 4 or BBC Sounds.

Two weeks ago, the Conservative peer, Zach Goldsmith, tweeted, How does a society survive if a quarter of its people are disabled? He was tweeting in response to a graph that someone else had posted, which depicted the number of people who have a disability in the UK with a line snaking ever upwards. So, is it true? Are one in four people disabled? Our editor, Richard Varden, is here to tell us more. Hello, Richard. Hello, Tim.

So this graph is based on research from a major national survey, the Family Resources Survey. It's run by the Office for National Statistics on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions and the data is for 2022 to 2023. OK, so it's not just been made up on the internet? No, although like other national surveys, it has struggled to reach enough people recently.

The graph shows the estimated number of people with a disability in the UK, with the number rising to 16.1 million people, which is 24% of the population. And this is precisely what the Family Resources Survey reported. In fact, since Zach Goldsmith's tweet, we've had a fresh year's worth of data from the Family Resources Survey.

According to those most recent figures, it's gone up to 25% of the population, so bang on one in four. I'm sure some of our very loyalist listeners are getting deja vu, Richard, because we have discussed this before, haven't we? Yes, we looked at this question four years ago, and back then the figure was 21%, so more like one in five. Interesting, although I seem to remember that the devil was in the detail back then. Absolutely.

Absolutely. In order to count as disabled, you have to answer yes to two questions. Here's the first. Do you have any physical or mental health conditions or illnesses lasting or expected to last for 12 months or more?

And as I said last time, I have asthma and have done so all my life. It comes and goes but sometimes it can be pretty tricky, so I might have said yes to that one. But then comes the second question. Do any of your conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out day-to-day activities?

One, yes, a lot. Two, yes, a little. Three, not at all. Now, I don't think it reduces my ability to carry out my day-to-day activities a lot, but not at all seems a bit of a stretch, so I might say yes, a little. So Richard, how many said a lot and how many said a little?

Well, the Department for Work and Pensions told us that this information isn't publicly available and we'd need to submit a Freedom of Information request, which is strange because when we looked at the exact same statistic back in 2021, they were happy to give us that information. Back then, they were roughly equal. About 10% answered yes, a lot, and 10% said yes, a little. But this definition of disability is capturing a very wide range of conditions and it's also capturing different degrees of disability. But...

Zach Goldsmith's original tweet gestured towards the idea that, well, a quarter of your population being disabled is economically unsustainable. But, Richard, you are here, despite your self-declared disability, you are editing more or less with your inimitable efficiency and productivity. Even though I've had some health issues recently. Are we really counting choking on a kebab as a health issue? No, the Heimlich manoeuvre worked perfectly well, thank you. I'm more thinking about my occasional seizures.

Fair. But thankfully you are still perfectly able to work. So does this 25% figure really tell us anything about the effect of the prevalence of disability on our economy? Good question. So we can compare the proportion of people estimated to be disabled with the proportion of people who claim disability-related benefits, like the incapacity element of Universal Credit or personal independence payments. We're looking at people who claim at least one of these benefits

So some will claim one and some both kinds. And since the data isn't very joined up, it's simpler to look at the moment at just England and Wales.

By 2024, there were 7.4 million people on these benefits in England and Wales. That's about 12% of people, almost half the 25% reported disabled by the Family Resources Survey for the UK. Which means the proportion of people claiming disability-related benefits is much lower than the proportion reported to be disabled. And the difference is even more pronounced if you look at just working age benefits for England and Wales. About 10% of 16 to 64-year-olds claim these benefits.

It's worth remembering, though, that these numbers are large and are growing. That 10% figure for the working age population, before the pandemic it used to be more like 8%.

Thank you, Richard. Stats, percentages, international comparison, information. Never let it be said that we at More or Less are anything other than fair. We will be mean about anyone who gets their stats wrong, even when one of our comedy heroes is speaking on our favourite radio network.

Here is satirist Armando Iannucci, the man behind The Thick of It, speaking to the journalist Helen Lewis on the Radio 4 series Strong Message Here. Tax fraud is 30 times larger than benefit fraud, but you don't see vans going round the country with big labels on. If your boss is moving a decimal point where it shouldn't be, can you report them, please? 30 times larger? Are you sure?

Seems like a very large number. At this point we would usually try to pull apart the figure and inspect it, but the BBC Complaints Unit have already done that for us in a correction that they have published. In the latest comparable government statistics, overpayments due to benefit fraud were £6.4 billion, while overpayments due to tax evasion – illegal, non-payment or underpayment of tax – were £5.5 billion.

Of course, estimating tax fraud is tricky. But 30 times higher than benefit fraud? That's an error. Is it an error that Malcolm Tucker would describe as so dense that light bends around it? Listeners, you be the judge. Hats off to our fact-checking friends at Full Fact, who brought this one to the BBC's attention.

What is going on with free school meals? The government has been offering free school meals to the children of families on low incomes for decades. A child can't learn on an empty stomach, after all. But in recent years, the number of children on free school meals has risen with alarming speed, from around one million pupils in the school year starting in September 2016 to around two million in the year starting 2023, which is the latest available.

I know it's been a tough few years, but can that really be right? Partly the number of pupils on preschool meals has increased because the total number of pupils in secondary schools has increased. And over the last couple of years, there have been signs of increasing poverty. But the real culprit is neither of those things. It's a change in the eligibility rules.

Jude Hillary is the co-head of UK Policy at the National Foundation for Educational Research. There's also been the introduction of the transitional arrangements to ease the introduction of the Universal Credit rollout. Universal Credit was gradually introduced as a replacement for a range of other benefits from 2013, and it was fully up and running by 2018.

to ease the transition for children on free school meals, the government put in place a safety net. Under these transitional arrangements, any pupils who were eligible for free school meals at any point between April 2018 and March 2025 would retain their free school meal eligibility.

until their phase of education was completed, even if their family circumstances had improved. That would do it. For example, even if you were only eligible for free school meals for one year at the start of primary school in 2018 on the basis of your family income, you'd be eligible for the meals for the whole of primary school.

While there has also been an increase in universal credit claimants, this change in eligibility means the free school meal number is now much less useful for comparison over time. It is measuring something different to what it measured before. And the reason this matters is that the government uses this free school meal figure to work out something else. The government used this proxy free school meals eligibility to define what a disadvantaged pupil is. So

People who's been eligible and has claimed free school meals at any point in the last six years or has been in the care of a local authority at any point is deemed to be disadvantaged. There are other people.

small categories as well, but that's broadly what a disadvantaged pupil is. And this stat in turn is used to calculate another stat. There's been this large and long standing gap in education outcomes between pupils who come from an economically disadvantaged background and their peers. The eligibility changes are likely to move kids at the bottom of the high-income group to the top of the low-income group.

This could make both groups have higher attainment. And it may or may not affect the gap. The point is that there's so much going into the statistical blender that it's becoming more and more difficult to say what the measure is measuring. It's quite hard to know what's happening because of dramatic increases in the underlying population composition of disadvantaged groups. So

is becoming increasingly difficult and will become more so over the next decade and beyond. Because the disadvantaged data is based on whether a pupil has had free school meals in the last six years, it is going to take a while for the big increase in eligibility to work through the statistical system. The Department for Education believe that it's only made a minimal impact on the latest figures and they are actively reviewing the measure.

Unless they do something to change it, the disadvantaged gap risks becoming increasingly meaningless as time goes on. Thanks to Jude Hillary of the National Foundation for Educational Research. That is all we have time for this week, but please send your questions and comments to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. We will be back next week with the last in this series. Until then, goodbye.

More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles, with Nathan Gower and Lizzie McNeill. The production coordinator was Brenda Brown. The programme was recorded and mixed by James Beard. And our editor is Richard Varden.

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