Are 4% of young women in the UK on OnlyFans?
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. We're brought to you courtesy of the licence fee. Although we are pondering setting up an OnlyFans account. Apparently everyone's doing it. More on that story later. We'll also examine a popular claim that today's working mothers spend more time with their children than your stereotypical 1950s housewife did.

And do people in Scotland use much more water than people in Yorkshire? If so, why?

Surely it's not a porridge versus pudding thing. But first, loyal listener Matthew Jones emailed more or less at bbc.co.uk. I saw this statistic on the front page of The Sun today. Surely this can't be true. Here is the headline. Insane! £4.7 billion migrant hotel bill takes every penny in tax from city size of Manchester.

That's insane with two Ns, by the way. You know, in as in no room at the inn. It doesn't really work on the radio. So, two claims there. One about hotels, one about the geography of taxes. And we should start by saying that despite the use of the word migrant, this isn't about immigrants in general, but about people seeking asylum. They aren't allowed to work before their asylum claim has been processed, and while they wait...

the government has a legal obligation to support them. Hence the fact that some of them end up in hotels. So let's focus on that hotel bill claim first. I've been speaking to Oliver Lodge, a director at the National Audit Office who recently completed a report on the subject. So let's start with this headline number. Is it true that the government...

spends £4.7 billion a year housing people seeking asylum in hotels? It is not, but that £4.7 billion is a number I recognise. It's the amount the Home Office spent in 2023-24 on the totality of supporting people seeking asylum.

So that includes the money it pays to accommodate asylum seekers who are destitute, but also the money it pays to support them through payments for food and subsistence, things like that. Okay, so it's a year out of date, and it's not the hotel bill, it's everything. It's food, it's all kinds of accommodation, all sorts of stuff. Do we know for that year, 23-24...

what the hotel bill specifically was out of that £4.7 billion? We do. We know that of the £4.7 billion, they spent £3.1 billion on hotels. And that is through the contracts they use to procure accommodation for people seeking asylum. But even within that, that £3.1 billion, because of the ways the contract works, won't be just the amount they pay for hotel rooms.

It also includes the transport of the people to and from hotels. It includes wraparound services at the hotels. So some of these hotels will provide food for the people staying there. So £3.1 billion is the total for that financial year. OK. So more than half of the total figure

There's a bit more going on than just the hotels. Now, that's last year. What about the most recent financial year? Has anything changed? Well, we're waiting for the final figures. But from the recent spending review, we can see that the estimated spend on asylum support for 2024-2025 is likely to be around £3.9 billion.

So that is a reduction on the £4.7 billion. Yeah, about 20% roughly. What we don't know yet is precisely how much of that will relate to the amount spent on hotels. We'd expect it to be lower because over time, recently, the Home Office has been successful in moving some people out of hotels and increasing the amount of dispersal accommodation that it uses. Dispersal accommodation is flats and houses in residential areas,

and it's got more people into those and correspondingly fewer in hotels. That is the basic answer. In 2023-24, the Home Office spent about £3 billion paying for hotels for people seeking asylum. The year after that, it spent less. But we're not sure yet how much less.

Now for some context. The government uses big outsourcing contractors, Clearsprings, Mears and Serco, to house people seeking asylum. They do this in basically two ways. One, called dispersal accommodation, involves housing people in cheap accommodation dispersed around the country. When they can't find space there, they use contingency accommodation, which is hotel rooms.

The Home Office told the National Audit Office roughly how much each option costs. When they were looking at those dispersal accommodation, they were using an average rate of around £14 to £15 per person per night. By contrast, hotels were modelled using a rate of around £140 to £150 per person per night. So the hotels are ten times more expensive –

Over the last few years, the number of people in the system has gone up and the system has built up a backlog. That means more people being housed for longer and that's why the contractors have turned to hotel rooms and the accommodation costs have spiked up. If we go back to 2019-20, the total amount the Home Office spent on asylum support was around £740 million. Right, so that's about 20% of the current figure. Way less. Way less. Yeah.

Jumping forward to 22-23, that figure had increased massively. So it was at 3.6 billion.

And of that £3.6 billion, £2.3 billion was on hotels. And then step forward one more year and we're up to our £4.7 billion and our £3.1 billion on hotels. Back in September 2023, around half of the 120,000 people seeking asylum were being housed in hotels –

In the latest stats, for March 2025, it's more like a third of 105,000, which is why the hotel bill is expected to come down. So that's claim one. The hotel bill for asylum seekers is £3 billion, not £4.7 billion. But how about the Sun's conversion of this number into the tax bill of a specific number of people? All people in city as big as Manchester.

Well, look, they publish their workings and as long as you know what they're talking about, it's fine. They work this out by using a figure for the average income in the UK and then working out how much income tax and national insurance a person on that income would pay and then dividing £4.7 billion by that number.

But this is a bad way to think about a tax bill. In fact, if you use this method to add up the total tax bill of everyone in the country, you get only about a quarter of all the tax we pay. So it makes the hotel bill seem much bigger than it really is. Why is there such a mismatch between the sun's calculation of the nation's tax bill and how much tax is really paid?

Two things. First, less than half of all tax revenue comes from national insurance and income tax. We're paying council tax, VAT, duty on alcohol and cigarettes, road tax and all the rest. Second, most income tax isn't paid by people on average income. It's paid by rich people because, well, that's where the money is. The top 10% of earners pay more than 60% of income tax.

If for some reason you did want to work out the hotel bill in terms of English towns, what about this? The government spends about £1.2 trillion per year, and most of that is paid for by taxes and the rest by borrowing.

£3 billion, which is a more accurate hotel bill, is about a quarter of 1% of that. And a quarter of 1% of the UK population is about 170,000 people. So more like Sunderland than Manchester. Any way you cut it, the hotel bill is big. There is no need to try to exaggerate it. You're listening to More or Less.

An article in The Spectator last week claimed that 4% of women in the UK aged between 18 and 34 are OnlyFans creators. OnlyFans is a content subscription service where creators make their own content and subscribers pay them for it.

In theory, the content can be about anything. Music, comedy, sharing recipes. Although it is most famous for pornographic content. Although personally, I stick to the baking part of the site. The article in The Spectator claimed that the UK has one of the highest concentrations of OnlyFans creators in the world, arguing that OnlyFans has young British women in its grip.

Part of what the author describes as a cascade of depravity. Cue moral panic. Unbelievably bleak stuff. Crushingly dispiriting. Is anybody even thinking about the consequences for marriage? So, is it true? Josephine Cassidy is here with me. Hello Jo. Hello.

So, the claim is that 1 in 25 British women aged 18 to 34 are OnlyFans creators, which sounds like a lot. Do you know where the number comes from?

Yes, so according to that Spectator article, the total number of OnlyFans creators in the UK is 280,000. They work out the percentage of young women from that total. And do they have a source for the 280,000? Well, that depends on what you mean by source. We tracked down that 280,000 figure to a blog post from last month called OnlyFans Statistics 2025. It's on a site that mainly sells tickets for concerts and festivals. They're

That blog post breaks down the number of OnlyFans creators by country. So that's just a random claim by someone on the internet, or maybe the fevered imagining of a large language model?

Yes, perhaps. But the blog post does point to another source, which is a random spreadsheet entitled OnlyFans, Drugs, etc. Like it? The spreadsheet includes 40 countries and a very eclectic range of data. So median income, religion, house prices, opiate use, and the number of OnlyFans creators. And it's just like a spreadsheet on the internet somewhere, is it?

What is this spreadsheet? I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I'd love to speak to whoever created it and find out the answers, but I don't know. And does it have a source? It does. So the source is a website which describes itself as an independent platform dedicated to connecting users with verified OnlyFans creators.

So basically that's a way of searching for OnlyFans creators and content. And it's created one of those heat maps of the world showing the number of creators in each country. I love a heat map. So it sounds like a goldmine of extremely reliable data. Right. Apparently there are 46 creators in Mongolia, 991 in North Korea and one lonely OnlyFans creator in Zambia. It's basically like our world in data, but for OnlyFans. I love this so much.

Except that, shockingly, perhaps everything about this is pretty much wrong. So, first of all, the number in the random spreadsheet that the spectator quoted is completely different from the number on this map. The spectator said that there were 280,000 creators in the UK, but the map says 25,000.

But maybe it's a live map, which is keeping up to date with the fluctuations in the numbers of OnlyFans creators? It's possible, but it seems to be giving them a lot of credit. And the next spanner in the works is that after tracking down this map, we contacted OnlyFans and they don't release any data about the location of their content creators. So there is no official source out there about where OnlyFans creators are based. So I don't want to say that this is basically all made up, but this is basically all made up. It

It would seem so. I mean, what we do know is that OnlyFans is a very successful and growing business. It has 4.1 million creator accounts in total worldwide. That's something OnlyFans does publish. And the amount of money that it pays to its creators was $6.6 billion in 2023. That's $1 billion more than the year before. So there probably are thousands of OnlyFans creators in the UK, but we have no idea what the precise number is.

Josephine Cassley, thank you.

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Hi, I'm Richard Karn, and you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one expandable garden hose. Well, the brand new Pocket Hose Copperhead with Pocket Pivot is here, and it's a total game changer. Old-fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot, but the Copperhead's Pocket Pivot swivels 360 degrees for full water flow and freedom to water with ease all around your home. When you're all done, this rust-proof anti-burst hose shrinks back down to pocket size for effortless handling and tidy storage.

Plus, your super light and ultra durable pocket hose copper head is backed with a 10-year warranty. What could be better than that? I'll

I'll tell you what, an exciting exclusive offer just for you. For a limited time, you can get a free Pocket Pivot and their 10-pattern sprayer with the purchase of any size Copperhead hose. Just text WATER to 64000. That's WATER to 64000 for your two free gifts with purchase. W-A-T-E-R to 64000. By texting 64000, you agree to receive recurring automated marketing messages from Pocket Hose. Message and data rates may apply. No purchase required. Terms apply. Available at pockethose.com slash terms.

Loyal listener Nigel emailed in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk to draw our attention to this surprising statistic found in a BBC article. Scotland uses 40% more water per person than Yorkshire. I know the people of Yorkshire are famously frugal and that the Scottish are very well endowed, aquatically speaking. Think Loch Ness, Loch Lomond, rain...

But it rains in northern England too, so can it really be true that each Scot uses 40% more water than each Yorkshireman or Yorkshirewoman? To find out, we spoke to the Water and Sewerage Undertakers, that is the term apparently, of Scotland. Scottish Water. More specifically, their stats guy, Brian McDowell, who is the Economic Demand Manager at Scottish Water.

We started off with how much water Scottish people use per person. We calculate right now that the average person in Scotland is using 178 litres per person per day. 178 litres per person per day. And Yorkshire? So Yorkshire report their average metre volume as 105 litres per person.

So Scotland uses 70% more water per person than Yorkshire, not 40% more water. Although that does mean Yorkshire uses about 40% less than Scotland. So maybe those figures have got a bit confused, but it still means Scotland uses an awful lot more water. But wait a minute. Why did we say metered for Yorkshire, but not for Scotland?

Scotland is using 178 litres per person per day. Average metered volume is 105 litres per person. Hmm. We did say metered for Yorkshire. Why? They have about 60% of metered domestic customers. OK, but what about north of the border? In Scotland, we have only 326 domestic metered customers.

That's against 2.6 million households. Only having 326 households on water meters is a very small number. The rest of the UK has 16 million metered homes. But does having a water meter really make a difference?

Turns out, yes. Yes, it does. Yorkshire's metered water use is 105 litres per person per day. But the households who don't use meters use more water. They also call out their unmetered volume as 152 litres per person and they have a combined average of 127 litres.

The Scottish average across metered and unmetered households is 178 litres per person per day, and that is 40% higher than the Yorkshire average of 127 litres. So the original claim is correct after all. And why do the Scots use more water? Maybe those metres are part of the explanation.

In the whole of the UK, the average unmetered water use is 171 litres per person per day, very similar to the Scottish average, while the average in the rest of the UK for metered water is 122 litres per day.

Now, that doesn't mean that meters cause low water consumption. It might be that low water consumption encourages people to install meters. Generally speaking, the unmetered properties are ones that have a lot of people in them or they're large properties with large grounds. Basically, homes where if you had water meters, it would cost more.

But Brian thinks that not metering water does also make households less conscious of saving this resource. I think the simple fact is the average person in Scotland doesn't know how much water they use. Let's try to break that down for them. Scottish Water calculates how much water is being used per household by monitoring a sample of houses in various locations and from various socio-economic groups.

People in a higher socio-economic bracket use more water than those in a lower bracket. The numbers do change depending on the socio-economic status. So it ranges from 203 litres per person on average in what we call the thriving neighbourhoods category and it then goes as low as 137 litres per person on average in the stretched society category.

So we know that wealthier households in Scotland use more water than less wealthy households. But what could be another driver of Scotland's water consumption rate? What about things such as leaky taps, pipes and toilets? That is a small fraction of the total volume. It does, however, account for about 60 million litres a day across the 2.6 million properties that we serve. Which would mean that for a household, 23 litres a day are lost to leaks within the home –

But this is not a uniquely Scottish issue. So overall, what drives water use? There have been studies by groups such as WaterWise and Energy Savings Trust and they say that 68% of our water is used in the bathroom, 22% in the kitchen and 10% outside bathrooms.

In terms of flushing the toilet, if every home that we serve, so that's 2.6 million homes, if they flushed the toilet once less in each day, that would save 15 million litres a day. So it's these small things that can make a big difference. Brian says that one of the other issues is that there historically hasn't been much awareness of the importance of water conservation in Scotland.

Billy Connolly once said that we've got two seasons in Scotland, June and winter. I think that just sums up the kind of Scottish relationship with water. The weather and more importantly, the rain is often the butt of jokes and conversations and the majority think that we've got an abundant supply. They see the rain and they see the wonderful water environment that Scotland has. We talk about 30,000 lofts and reservoirs, including Loch Ness.

But although they have all of these water sources, Scottish Water only have permission to use water from 412 extraction sites. So water isn't as plentiful as the average consumer might think.

So why do the Scottish use more water than the people of Yorkshire? It's impossible to be sure. But the answer is probably something to do with the fact that almost all Scots don't have metres. And without a metre, it can be easy to lose sight of usage. And when you're in a country that has so much water all around you, indulging in a longer shower or flushing the loo with abandon might not seem such a big deal.

If you want to get extra loyal listener points, then do make sure you're signed up to the right feed on BBC Sounds so you never miss an edition. Of course, as a test of loyalty, we haven't made it easy. There are three more or lesses on BBC Sounds and you have to use your rapier sharp wits to find the right one. For all of our programmes, the one you want is called More or Less Behind the Stats.

Loyal listener Calvin got in touch after listening to a podcast published by The Guardian. Well, not so loyal after all. I was listening to Today in Focus when I was startled by a statement. The average modern-day working mum spends more time with their child than a stay-at-home mum in the 50s. Disloyalty aside, is the claim true?

It seems to have come from a book called The Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, written by Professor Melissa Mielke, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, who joined me to explain all. Our listener is very struck by this claim that the average modern day working mum spends more time with their child than a stay-at-home mum in the 50s. Is that claim correct? It's

It's partly correct. I listened to the claim and I think the person said the average working mom currently spends about the same amount of time or more time in childcare and in the company of their children. And the thing is that those two are very different things. The way we measure how people spend time, we have quite different ways to assess their primary activity and then who is with them. And so it's a very important distinction between

So that quote was only about half right. Melissa's research is based on time use diaries, where participants fill out exactly what they did at what times during a day. Usually it's what they were doing yesterday, so the memory is still fresh. Researchers such as Melissa can then code this information into different primary activities, so they can compare the trends across time.

to be classified as childcare. That's when parents are reporting engaging in what we call primary childcare activities, those thought to promote kids' wellbeing and where the main focus is the child, say, feeding young children, teaching them, playing with them, taking them to activities and so on. Which is not the same as spending time with your child while you do something else. We also then ask for each activity to...

What else were you doing? Like a secondary activity. You might be doing the dishes and also talking to your child. So childcare and time spent with a child are different things in this research. Childcare is also something you don't do much of when your kids get older. But let's cut to the chase. When she looked at these time diaries, what did Melissa find? So in 1975...

Homemaker moms spent 10.7 hours per week on child care, and that does compare almost exactly to the employed mom of the year 2000 at 10.6 hours of child care per week. But when we look at the total time and presence of children, homemaker moms back in the 70s were spending 56 hours per week, and

in the company of their children compared to only 42 hours per week for the employed mum of the year 2000. So a working mother 20 years ago spent the same amount of time doing childcare as a housewife in the 1970s. But stay-at-home mums in the 70s spent longer with their kids overall. They were just doing housework or watching telly or whatever and letting them get on with stuff by themselves. Fascinating in itself,

But Melissa is being pretty gentle in calling the original claim half-right. And wait...

Didn't we start off talking about the 1950s? Our data starts in 1965 and I think the figures we used was 1975 because that's where we have that fuller who was with you in each activity where we didn't have that well, we didn't have the sample size back in the 60s to look at that. Before the 1970s, the data for working and non-working mums wasn't split out so you can't pull out the specific trend we want for this claim.

If you want to go back a bit further in time and use that 1965 data, then you have to amalgamate the working and non-working mums. And when you do that, the trend is pretty clear. If we pull all mothers together, we see that back years ago...

In the 60s, we have data that says, you know, mothers spend about 10 hours per week in this direct child care. Again, that's averaging across all mothers and across all ages of kids. And child care is really activities that are more focused on younger children. And then if we look at the year 2000, it's about 13 hours. So that child care has risen overall. And then today, and these are figures from the U.S.,

American Time Use Survey, our latest data point, it's about 15 hours. That latest figure of 15 hours a week on childcare breaks down to 11.7 hours per week for working mums and 20.3 hours for stay-at-home mums. That is double the figure for stay-at-home mums in the 1970s. So kids are getting more care in general.

Melissa says the reasons for this shift are complicated but probably not surprising, from an increasing child-centredness in society perhaps combined with our being more risk-averse and with a greater concern about child safety. This is why it's thought that parents feel that they need to invest more

But again, it's not that we're spending more time with kids, just more time in specific childcare tasks. Tell me about fathers. How are they spending their time with children?

taking care of children compared to the mothers and compared to the fathers of days gone by? So fathers really have increased their time significantly and even more so proportionately to the moms. If we look at the ratio of married mothers to married fathers time, and we often are just looking at married or partnered people in these kinds of comparisons because, you know, dads who are not living with their kids are a different story.

But over time, if we look at all, you know, childcare activities, moms are doing, you know, four times as much childcare, that more narrow category, as dads back in 1965. And today they're doing about only 1.8 times more than dads. So moms are still doing more, significantly more, but not even twice as much more than dads are doing. So dads have really changed quite significantly over this past 50 years or so. Thanks to Professor Melissa Mielke.

And that's all we have time for this week, but please keep your questions and comments coming in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. And if you'd like to explore the hidden history behind the numbers, head to bbc.co.uk, search for More or Less, and then follow the links to the Open University. We'll be back next week. Until then, goodbye.

More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Tom Coles, with Nicholas Barrett, Josephine Casserly, Lizzie McNeill and David Verry. Our production coordinator was Brenda Brown. The programme was recorded and mixed by James Beard. And our editor is Richard Varden. How is it that some brands and products really capture our imagination, seem to be ahead of the game, but then somehow end up toast?

I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas. We hear from people directly involved in building the successes. They were looking for us to build scale quickly, gain a dominant market position, and that's what we did. And get expert insight into why they faltered.

So in effect, Woolworths was being drained of cash and people tried damned hard to save it. From FHM magazine to Woolworths via Nike's fitness band and FreeServe's internet service, Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds.