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It’s common knowledge that Henry VIII had six wives. But the cataclysmic love triangle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn gets all the airtime, while wives three to six are an afterthought.
In director Alexander Korda’s rollicking film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Katherine Parr (wife six) was reduced to a throwaway joke in the film’s last moments. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s upcoming film Firebrand is the first to bring Parr to centre stage – and not before time.
Right on cue, new evidence has come to light giving an intriguing glimpse into Parr’s relationship with her capricious husband. Namely, the discovery of Henry’s notes in a book authored by his wife.
Katherine Parr was unlike her five predecessors. Aged 30 and already twice widowed in 1543, the king made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, forcing her to break off another planned marriage. The increasingly disabled Henry had finally stopped pursuing nubile broodmares and sought out a companion instead.
Parr deftly navigated the tangled politics of the royal family, brokering a reconciliation between the king and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he had declared to be bastards. She may even have helped in restoring them to the line of succession.
Henry certainly came to trust her judgment. When he set off for his final, futile war in France in 1544, he made her regent in his absence. Part of the appeal, it seems, was her bookish piety. Parr was the first English queen to publish a book and the first English woman to publish under her own name.
Her three books were pious exercises, beginning with a safe collection of translated texts titled Psalmes or Prayers (1544) and becoming more daring thereafter. The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) was written during Henry’s husband’s lifetime, but its theology was too assertively Protestant to be published until he was safely dead.
The earlier books, though, seem to have delighted the king. He inscribed the queen’s own copy of Psalmes or Prayers: “Remember this writer / when you do pray / For he is yours”. He had always been theatrically pious and in his last years – brooding, in pain, nurturing his many humiliations – he turned to religion with melancholy intensity.
We know what Henry thought religion should mean to his subjects: a tough, moralistic faith without much room for forgiveness, whose keynote was obedience to himself. But what about his personal faith?
Enter a new discovery by Canadian literary scholar Micheline White.
Queen Katherine ordered a few luxury copies of Psalmes or Prayers printed on vellum, with delicate hand colouring. One of these, now in Buckinghamshire’s Wormsley Library is festooned with marginal markings and “manicules” – little doodled hands with fingers pointing to a passage some reader wanted to emphasise.
White has established, by meticulously comparing these distinctive manicules with others whose provenance we know, that this attentive reader was none other than Henry VIII.
It’s no surprise Henry should have taken comfort in the Biblical psalms. They were supposedly the work of a pious but lecherous king, David, with whom he strongly identified.
The passages Henry marked are a telling glimpse of the extent – and the limits – of his self awareness. His illness and other troubles are much on his mind: he marks prayers to “take away thy plagues … turn away thine anger”.
He is also drawn to prayers lamenting sin and asking God for wisdom. “Give me a new heart, and a right spirit, and take from me all wicked and sinful desires.”
The sentiments indicate a man who was serious both about his kingly responsibilities and personal spiritual predicament. Unlike many other murderous narcissists, Henry VIII did know he was a sinner who needed forgiveness. But his confidence “that my sins may be purged” suggests tension between the eagerness with which he sought grace and his refusal to countenance mercy – royal or divine – for his subjects.
Queen Katherine, as the popular rhyme tells us, “survived” her marriage, but it was a close run thing.
In 1546, the last summer of Henry VIII’s life, she was suspected – on good grounds – of nurturing a nest of religious radicals at court. Henry allowed himself to be persuaded that all her pious talk was actually an attempt to allure him into heresy.
According to a late but well-informed account by the martyrologist John Foxe, she got wind of the danger and immediately threw herself on his mercy. Katherine protested that she, a “poor woman so much inferior in all respects of nature unto you”, had simply been seeking his religious guidance.
“Not so, by Saint Mary,” Henry replied. “You are become a Doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed, or directed by us.”
No, she protested: she had only sought to distract him with talk during “this painful time of your infirmity” and had in the process learned a great deal from his wisdom. With someone else, that might have been laying it on too thick, but she knew her man.
“And is it even so, sweetheart?” Henry replied. “Then perfect friends we are now again.” The arrest warrant was cancelled.
Months later, the king was dead. Unfortunately, Queen Katherine married the man she’d kept waiting with almost indecent haste – only to be cold shouldered when she fell pregnant and left to die in childbirth. History is thin on happy endings.
Alec Ryrie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
To reach net zero, the world may need as many 200,000 offshore wind turbines generating 2,000 gigawatts (GW) of energy.
To put this in context, by the end of 2022, 63 GW of offshore wind capacity had been installed worldwide. Within the next 28 years, the offshore wind energy sector needs to expand so that it is capable of producing 32 times its current energy capacity.
But where do we put all these extra offshore wind farms? Their locations will need to be chosen in order to maximise their energy output and their social benefits, while ensuring they have the minimum impact possible on the environment. Balancing all these factors is not a straightforward task.
To work out where to place new turbines, a good starting point is to define how much of the ocean we need to use in order to meet the 2050 net zero targets. This calculation depends on the dimensions of the turbines, how wind power technology is likely to evolve between now and 2050, and the exact configuration of the turbines within a wind farm.
Together, these factors control the future “power density” of offshore wind farms –- how much offshore wind capacity can be installed per unit area of space in the ocean. The figure required for achieving net zero is 4 megawatts (MW) per sq km. This means the area of ocean we’ll need for offshore wind is around 500,000 sq km, which is roughly the size of France.
Once the total space is known, the next task is to gather data on the factors that constrain infrastructure development in the ocean. There are numerous constraints, from ensuring there is adequate windspeed for turbines to turn, to avoiding shipping lanes and marine protected areas, to whether seabed conditions are difficult to build in.
Some types of constraint create “no-go zones”, because an offshore wind farm would cause clear and unacceptable disruption to an existing activity, such as a site used for military exercises, for oil drilling or a shipping lane.
For other constraints, it’s a case of working out whether the net impact of a wind farm is harmful to the environment or the activities already there. It’s important to identify how crowded prospective sites are, as this provides a baseline, or starting point, for assessing a site’s suitability.
Our recent research shows how such considerations can be used to identify suitable future sites for offshore wind farms, using UK waters as a case study.
The UK is a leading region for offshore wind, so the country offers insights into the challenges faced globally in placing new wind farms. The UK is also a leader in legislating for net zero, including plans for transforming energy infrastructure.
Our study used 34 different layers of constraints, from which the available space for future sites is defined by excluding the no-go and crowded zones. We identified the available ocean space for future offshore wind turbines as covering an area of about 240 sq km, which is equivalent to the area of the UK’s landmass.
The data further reveals that, to achieve the basic net zero target for domestic electrification in the UK, 7% of that available area will need to be used for offshore wind farms. Domestic electrification refers to the conversion of homes to electric heating from (predominantly) gas.
For more ambitious decarbonisation targets for offshore wind, accounting for increased domestic electricity demand among other things, the required space rises to 44%.
If future offshore wind farms are to be shared out equally across the space available for them, up to 70% of future sites will overlap with one to three constraints. Moreover, about 90% of future sites will have to be in deep water (roughly 60m in depth).
New technology, such as floating platforms, will be crucial to enable wind turbines to be installed in these places.
Our study suggests that the huge expansion of offshore wind farms required to meet net zero targets may be achievable. Furthermore, it can be done without increasing the average level of overlap with existing activities in UK waters.
However, it’s still possible that an expansion of offshore wind could harm the environment or limit existing ocean activities. For example, in the case of marine protected zones, wind farms could stop fish and animals from spreading into adjacent parts of the ocean. Potentially, this would undermine some of the objectives behind creating the protected zone in the first place.
Increasing interaction between wind farms, natural ecosystems, heritage sites such as shipwrecks, and human activities is inevitable. Without careful planning and study, these interactions could harm the environment and disrupt wider human activities. They must therefore be anticipated and addressed proactively.
The move to turbines in deeper water and further away from shore, however, poses some real challenges. It is these challenges that will need to be overcome by improved technology.
Hugo Putuhena is affiliated with the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) hub and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies - Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering.
Fraser Sturt is a deputy director for the University of Southampton's Marine & Maritime Institute. He receives funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering Engineering X programme, looking at Safer End of Engineered life for offshore infrastructure and ships, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council as part of the Towards a National Collection Unpath'd waters project.
Susan Gourvenec receives funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering supporting her Chair in Emerging Technologies for Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering.
The recent coronation of King Charles III was a high-profile example of when facial recognition technology has been used to monitor a crowd, but there are plenty of others. The technology is used by law enforcement all over the UK and other countries.
It’s now common in US airports. It’s being used to monitor refugees and identify dead bodies in Ukraine. Even Beyoncé fans have been subjected to it.
And there’s more to come. The UK government is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to the police’s body-worn devices, drones and numberplate cameras. It may soon be very difficult to leave your house without having your face scanned.
There are serious questions about whether the benefits of this technology outweigh such concerns. But steps could be taken to address the issues people are worried about.
Facial recognition can be used by police to scan many faces in a crowd and compare them with a “watch list” of known criminals. This “live facial recognition” is used with the aim of reducing crime. It can also be used retroactively on recorded CCTV footage.
In the UK, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides a legal basis for the use of surveillance camera systems in a public place.
And according to the government’s surveillance camera code of practice, it’s justifiable to use facial recognition systems in decisions that could negatively affect people, such as whether to arrest them, so long as there is a human in the loop to supervise and make decisions.
So the use of facial recognition systems, or those for other types of biometric information, cannot be used for autonomous decision making, such as automatically tracking a suspect across multiple camera feeds.
But why should this be of concern to law-abiding citizens? Civil liberties groups argue facial recognition use in public places affects our privacy and freedom, particularly in terms of its ability to track individuals at mass gatherings and to potentially engage in racial profiling.
Security cameras have long captured us as we went about our daily lives. However, authorities easily being able to put a name to a face in the video footage is something we’re not so used to.
The technology creates a situation where many more people could get caught in the sights of the authorities than before. A person’s casual indiscretions or errors of judgement can now be easily tracked and linked to a name and address.
Those with a criminal record could be targeted in public based on their past, regardless of whether they intend to carry out any illegal activity. The technology could provide new opportunities for racial profiling, where authorities track or suspect people based on their background, rather than because of specific information about them.
Facial recognition could also be used against people with no criminal past or plans to commit a crime but who the police simply want to stop, such as protesters. The Metropolitan Police may have announced that facial recognition would not be used to target activists at the coronation, but they also provoked outrage for arresting anti-monarchy demonstrators who were later released without charge.
It’s also important to recognise facial recognition technology still suffers from inaccuracies, which can result in false positive matches where an innocent person is mistaken for a known criminal.
With facial recognition posing such perceived threats, it could have a chilling effect on free speech and demonstrations
However, there are ways that the technology could be used more safely. Law enforcement teams could perform two preliminary steps – activity recognition or event detection – before they resort to face recognition. This approach can help minimise the potential for privacy violations and false positive matches.
Activity recognition refers to the process of identifying and categorising human activities or actions based on CCTV or other sensors. It aims to understand and recognise the activities of individuals or groups, which can include standard activities such as running, sitting or eating.
On the other hand, event detection focuses on identifying specific events or occurrences of interest within a given context. Events can range from simple events like a car passing by or a person entering a room to more complex events like accidents, fights, or more unusual behaviour. Event detection algorithms typically analyse CCTV and other sensors to detect and locate events.
Hence, activity recognition or event detection should be the first step before applying facial recognition to a surveillance camera feed.
Ensuring the data from cameras remains anonymous can also enable police to study the activities of people in the crowd while preserving their privacy. Conducting regular audits and reviews can ensure that the collected data is handled responsibly and in compliance with UK data privacy regulations.
This can also help to address some of the concerns related to transparency and accuracy. By using activity recognition or event detection as a first step, it may be possible to give people more clarity – through signage, for example – about what exactly is going on during police surveillance in a public place.
It is the responsibility of the state to ensure the privacy and security of its citizens in order to foster a healthy society. But if facial recognition is implemented in a way that a significant proportion of citizens feel infringes their rights, it could create a culture of suspicion and a society where few people feel safe expressing themselves publicly.
Nadia Kanwal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
More than 80% of women in England and Wales will become mothers at some point during their working lives, according to OECD figures. Most of these women will have two children around two or three years apart, spending at least 20 years of their adult lives with a child under 18 and creating significant childcare needs for some of this time.
The current price of childcare is high, averaging £149 per week in Great Britain for 25 hours of care for a child under two years old. This represents about 60% of the minimum wage earnings of someone working part-time (around 25 hours per week), and 25% of the median full-time earnings for a woman in Great Britain.
Availability is also a problem. Only 57% of local authorities report having enough childcare places for children under the age of two.
Career breaks during motherhood are a major driver of the increase in the gender pay gap over the child-bearing years. Mothers’ earnings ten and even 20 years after the birth of a first child are about 20% lower than a similar childless woman. Fathers’ earnings over the same life stages do not show any evidence of these “child penalties”.
Having children creates a double hurdle when a mother is deciding whether and how much to work. First, childcare fees substantially reduce take-home pay. But also, time is valued differently. When not at work, it changes from leisure time to time spent with your child (and a little leisure too, of course).
Both hurdles reduce the attractiveness of work. But while the latter reflects a combination of individual preferences and social norms, the former – childcare costs – can be overcome with the right policies. If these policies do not alleviate childcare costs and give parents (affordable) ways to work, mothers will lose out in the long term – but so will the wider economy.
On an individual level, wage growth is affected by the decision to work part time or not at all because only full-time employment typically leads to wage progression. The relative penalties of choosing a part-time job or no work are particularly marked for graduates.
Lower wages will also have a negative impact on both women’s independence and on their productivity, feeding into the economy. Low wages and hours worked by mothers, combined with parents’ separation are an important source of child poverty. In less educated families, women’s employment is the most effective measure against the incidence of child poverty.
Research shows that childcare subsidies are the most effective policy for raising mothers’ labour supply, particularly among low-skill households. Unsurprisingly, subsidies conditional on work are a more effective incentive to get people to seek or remain in employment than unconditional child credits, which can reduce the attractiveness of work.
Research also shows that childcare subsidies can be partly self-financing over the long term. If mothers work more now and then enjoy more wage growth over time, they are more likely to continue to work and earn more in the future. This means they will pay more income tax, which could offset some of the initial government spending on childcare subsidies.
But designing childcare subsidies should not just be about cost and the average price per hour of care for young children. Research on what other countries do shows there are four dimensions that typically affect families’ choices:
One factor that tends to limit the power of such policies is the strength of prevailing social norms. Public opinion (and academic literature) on the role of mothers, fathers and childcare providers in the wellbeing and development of young children has evolved over past decades. It is now much more socially acceptable for mothers to work and fathers to be more involved in childcare.
Such thinking also affects government choices when it comes to developing policies to support families. Individual perceptions on the role of mothers as the primary caregiver have been found to drive both mothers’ labour force participation and their decision to have children in cross-country comparisons. These social preferences will also drive political support for childcare policies and hence policymakers’ choices.
In the medium term, childcare subsidies can reduce the gap between mothers’ and fathers’ career paths, and increase mothers’ economic value in the working world. But beyond this, higher rates of employment among mothers in this generation will also influence the next generation’s perceptions about the compatibility of career and motherhood.
By helping to shape future social norms, childcare subsidies could offer more choices to mothers – not only today, but even more so for the next generation of women.
Helene Turon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life, which opened at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in June, explores how humans relate to spiders. It features installations of spider webs displayed and lit to be viewed as sculptures. There are also films: one made about Saraceno’s work with groups battling lithium mining in Argentina and another about spider diviners from Somié village in Cameroon.
That’s where I came in. Ŋgam dù (the Mambila term for spider divination) is one of many types of oracle or divination used by Mambila people in Cameroon. It is the most trusted form and – unlike other types which are sometimes dismissed as mere games – its results can be used as evidence in the country’s courts. Variants of this form of divination are found throughout southern Cameroon and the long history of the word ŋgam attests to the longevity of the practice.
I work as a social anthropologist in the Mambila village of Somié. I have visited almost every year since 1985, working on a variety of projects. Divination was the focus of a chapter in my PhD in 1990, but I never stopped working on the subject. As well as becoming an initiated diviner, I have continued to think about the wider implications of using divination or oracles.
Ngam dù is a form of divination in which binary (either/or) questions are asked of large spiders that live in holes in the ground. The options are linked to a stick and a stone then, using a set of leaf cards marked with symbols, the spider is left to make its choice.
The hole plus the stick, stone and cards are covered up. The spider emerges and will move the cards so the diviner can then interpret the pattern relative to the stick and stone. If cards are placed on the stick, then the option associated with that has been selected, and vice versa if the cards are placed on the stone.
Things get more interesting (at least to me and other diviners) if both options are selected, or neither. Sometimes a contradictory response is interpreted to mean that the question posed is not a good one. The diviner is thereby told to go and discuss the issue with the client and reframe the problem, posing a different question.
The process is “calibrated” regularly by asking test questions such as “Am I here alone?” or “Will I drink tonight?”. Spiders that fail these tests are discarded as liars and not used for future consultations. It’s also common to ask the same question in parallel to get a consistency check, so more than one spider can be used at the same time. Sometimes the stick and stone option are reversed to ensure that the spider isn’t just moving the cards always in the same direction.
Mambila diviners rely on these tests to justify the system, although they also say (as do many groups in Cameroon) that spiders are a source of wisdom since they live in the ground where the “village of the dead” is found.
As an anthropologist, I avoid questions about whether spider divination is true. For me the important question is: “Does it help?”
Sometimes the results of divination are considered, but rejected, and the advice is not followed. Even in these instances it can be helpful, however, since it enables people decide on a course of action.
People use the results as a tool to help them think through hard decisions such as who to marry, or where to go for treatment when a child is ill. The latter involves weighing up conflicting considerations about expense, the possibility an illness has been caused by witchcraft and the reputations for effective treatment of different traditional healers as well as of rival biomedical health centres.
I met the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno when he had an exhibit at the Venice Bienale in 2018. He was intrigued by the computer simulation of spider divination that my colleague Mike Fischer had made. He invited me to Venice to demonstrate the simulation and talk about spider divination in front of his “sculptures”, which are made in collaboration with spiders. They are patterns of spiderwebs displayed as art.
As we talked, I said that if one day he wanted to visit Cameroon I would be happy to introduce him to the diviners I worked with. In December 2019, he came with his friend, the filmmaker Maxi Laina. We visited Somié, where he worked with the diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios and the Mambila filmmaker Nguea Iréné.
Saraceno and Laina came with some questions to ask from their friends. This included “Who would win the 2020 US election?” This was the Trump v Biden election, the results of which Trump went on to question. The answer was that there would be a new president but it would not be straightforward!
Saraceno liked the idea that spiders could help humans resolve their personal problems. It gave an example of a different way in which human-spider relationships are expressed. Bollo liked the idea of opening the process up to questions from outside the village. He already has some clients from other places in Cameroon who call him, so working internationally is very doable.
He suggested that Saraceno could make his work accessible via the internet, which he has now done through a dedicated website. Some of the first results are included in the Serpentine exhibition along with film made by Nguea Iréné of Bollo in action. The film will also be shown in the village later in the summer.
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life is on at London’s Serpentine South Gallery until 10 September.
David Zeitlyn has received funding from AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC
The UK prison population has risen by around 74% since 1990, with 78,037 people now serving sentences. Research shows that taking part in educational activities while serving a sentence can help people cope with prison life and reduce reoffending.
There is an education department in every prison typically offering academic courses such as literacy and numeracy, and vocational courses such as joinery and bricklaying. However, numbers of people engaging in prison education are declining as it becomes increasingly undervalued and under-resourced. So, it’s vital to develop engaging educational activities in prisons.
One way to do this is to link education with family activities. Around half of the people in prison have children. Maintaining good relationships between parents and their children during a sentence can reduce reoffending and help people to reintegrate with their families upon release. It can also help children to better cope with someone close to them being in prison.
However, it is challenging to maintain family relationships because of the lack of meaningful contact between prisoners and their children. With our White Water Writers project, we believed that linking education with family activities would encourage prisoners who might not typically participate in education to get involved, and help foster better family relationships.
White Water Writers (WWW) gives groups of eight to ten people the opportunity to collaboratively plan, write and publish a full-length novel in just one week. Books go on sale online and the authors receive professionally printed copies of their novels. Originally developed in schools, WWW has enabled more than 3,000 young people to become published authors.
We decided to run the project in a prison to provide an engaging and motivating educational opportunity. We linked the work to families by inviting participants to write a novel for their children, who would then produce the illustrations for the book. Our research explored the impact WWW had on both the prisoners and their families.
Eight men from a prison in England took part, and were given four days to collaboratively write and publish a novel for their children, supported by a facilitator and prison staff.
A key principle of WWW is that no one from outside the group is involved in developing the plot, writing or editing. On the first day, each writer created their own character and, together, the group developed the plot. On the second and third days, they collaboratively wrote their novel. On the fourth day, they proofread it – and then the final day was a family day, where children visited the prison and produced the illustrations.
While the writers were initially a little daunted at the prospect of writing a novel, they worked hard to produce something their children would enjoy – the result was an exciting fantasy adventure of around 8,000 words. To understand the impact of the project, we then interviewed the writers, their families and prison staff about their experiences, as well as analysing their novel.
The book helped the children to better understand their fathers’ experiences. It had two main themes: “people not being bad” and “people changing for the better”. The villains in the book are not bad people. Rather, they experience difficult circumstances which lead to challenging emotions, and these in turn lead to bad behaviours.
However, by the end of the novel, the villains are reformed. For example, one character, who is a bear, is in prison at the start of the book but wants to change his life. The book ends with him putting his life at risk to save the world.
Many of the writers included their own children in the novel as characters. This helped them connect with their children, who enjoyed seeing themselves in the book. One participant said he wrote the plotline of his daughter becoming braver in the story to help her deal with the anxiety she was feeling about moving to a new school.
The writers said they would not have engaged with WWW if it had not been linked to their families. The family visit day was an incentive, and they enjoyed creating something tangible for their children. All the authors said they improved a range of skills including writing, typing, computer skills and “soft skills” such as teamwork.
As many had negative experiences of education and few had any formal qualifications, they did not expect to complete the novel. Their success led them to feel proud of themselves: “The fact that I can write a thousand words, I am stunned,” one said.
The project also led the men and their families to feel more connected to each other. Family members discussed feelings of pride in what the writers had achieved.
We even discovered that one of the children had dressed as her character for World Book Day at school. She told her teacher about the book, and the class then used it as their reading book. One member of prison staff said:
How that child must feel to have something positive from her daddy and to share that with her classmates. I certainly didn’t expect that, and I think it’s a massive success and has obviously had an impact.
This suggests that linking projects with families, where appropriate, may be a way to increase engagement with education and provide meaningful opportunities for contact between people in prison and their families. This will have positive results not just for those in prison, but for their families as well.
Yvonne Skipper is a Trustee for the Charity eQuality Time which runs the White Water Writers project. She has received funding from Novus Prison Education, the British Academy, EPSRC and ESRC.
Zafar Khan, the former finance director of collapsed mega-contractor Carillion, has been banned from being a company director for 11 years. It is the longest ban imposed on an executive of a listed company by the Insolvency Service (IS) in 60 years, raising the prospect of lengthy bans for seven other former directors being pursued in relation to the collapse.
Khan, 54, is a former Ernst & Young accountant who joined Carillion’s senior finance team in 2011. He was promoted to chief financial officer in August 2016, replacing the long-serving Richard Adam, though he only remained in post for nine months as the company’s financial troubles prompted a boardroom clear-out.
Carillion then collapsed in 2018, putting thousands of staff out of work and leaving debts of around £7 billion, including a pension deficit in excess of £1 billion.
The government said that Khan’s disqualification was for several reasons, including causing the company to rely on “false and misleading information” that led to a material misstatement of profits in various projects to the tune of at least £209 million. He also sanctioned a £54 million dividend payment that couldn’t be justified because it was based on financial statements that did not give a fair view of the company’s position.
Khan has yet to respond to the announcement. The fact that only his disqualification has been announced suggests that he may have reached an agreement with the IS, perhaps in exchange for a lighter punishment. The remaining directors, including former chief executives Richard Howson and Keith Cochrane, as well as Richard Adam, are due at the high court later this year to defend the IS’s disqualification actions against them.
Khan, Howson and Adam have also been fined a total of almost £1 million by the Financial Conduct Authority for issuing misleading statements to investors about Carillion’s finances. They are reportedly appealing – again, it will be interesting to see whether this still includes Khan.
Carillion was created in 1999 after being spun off from construction group Tarmac. It mainly built and operated government buildings and infrastructure, and appeared to be in good health for much of its corporate life.
It was hard to see how the company could suffer from liquidity issues, particularly when it reported a record annual dividend of £79 million as recently as 2017.
However, Carillion’s fall from grace was swift and dramatic. On January 15 2018 it was placed into compulsory liquidation by the high court, the biggest of its kind in UK legal history.
As well as the loss of jobs, this had huge ramifications for Carillion’s many ongoing building projects, including schools, hospitals and roads – not to mention a facilities management business providing, amongst other things, school meals to children.
The government’s Official Receiver was put in charge of the liquidation, but appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to help oversee the process. This has involved things like completing schools and motorways, transferring hospital jobs and numerous contracts. PwC has earned more than £50 million in fees as a result.
Meanwhile, the 27,000 members of Carillion’s defined benefit pension scheme have seen their pensions reduced, and roughly 30,000 suppliers are likely to have lost most of the billions of pounds owed to them by the company.
The collapse initially triggered investigations by the National Audit Office and by several parliamentary committees. The parliamentary findings did not mince their words, finding that the directors “misrepresented the reality of the business”.
The report described the company’s collapse as, “a story of recklessness, hubris and greed … its business model was a relentless dash for cash”.
There have been previous high-profile actions against directors. The directors of the failed MG Rover group were disqualified for between three and six years in 2011, while the IS brought an unsuccessful case against the trustee directors of the Kids Company charity in 2021.
The difference with Carillion is that the directors face longer bans, and now the former finance director of all people has accepted the punishment instead of waiting for the court hearings. It may indicate that he agrees that the evidence is sufficient to show that he behaved in an unfit manner as a director.
It looks as though the IS has stuck to its guns over Carillion and is potentially heading for a significant success in its efforts to ensure that directors of listed companies do not see themselves as immune from the consequences of poor management decisions.
It hopefully sends a signal that the government is serious about punishing corporate wrongdoing. The big question now is what happens with the rest of the directors.
John Tribe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Millions of UK mortgage borrowers could experience significant payment shocks this year. This is happening due to a steep rise in the Bank of England’s base rate over the past year to the highest level since 2008. This rate feeds through to many of the mortgage deals taken out by homeowners around the UK.
To attempt to alleviate some of the pain for homeowners that will see large spikes in their payments this year and next, major UK lenders agreed to provide limited help to those struggling with the mortgage repayments.
Among other measures, lenders that participate will agree to allow borrowers to switch to interest-only payment terms or to extend the duration of their mortgage. Borrowers will be able to return to their original deal within six months without any impact on their credit rating. Lenders have also been asked to sign up to a 12-month repossession break to provide a grace period to people at risk losing their homes due to arrears.
But while these measures will help some borrowers, they could cause unintended consequences and create further mortgage payment issues. First of all, the Bank of England’s base rate is already expected to rise to 6% by the end of 2023 and could go higher next year.
Interest-only borrowers’ repayments only include the interest charged on the loan and nothing towards the principal amount. So, after six months (and at the same level of income), they could face much higher payment shocks. If rates are still relatively high after 12 months, many households could still be at risk of losing their homes.
There is also the question of which lenders will participate in mortgage rescue plan – it is a voluntary scheme. According to the FCA, around 75% of lenders will join. Those borrowers with nonparticipating lenders would not be able to use the grace period or other measures.
Another overlooked issue in the rescue plan is that, according to my research, households across the various regions of the UK will be affected differently by the mortgage crisis. Payment shocks will be amplified for those in the areas with higher house prices and higher average loan amounts.
The table below shows the difference in the increase in repayments for an average loan amount across the UK, based on different types of mortgage product. These figures show what repayments would have been in June 2022 versus June 2023, when the Bank of England had increased rates from 1.25% (for June 2022) to 5.00% (for June 2023) – repayments will be even higher if it goes to 6%, as expected by financial markets.
Repayment increases by region, June 2022 vs. June 2023:
The monthly mortgage repayments of households in London on standard variable rates (SVRs – the rate borrowers tend to automatically switch to after a fixed or tracker deal period ends) increased by £1,398 and by £1,142 for those on three-year fixed rate mortgages, for example. In the East Midlands, in comparison, average SVR repayments have increased by £587 and by £429 for three-year fixed rates since last year.
Taking current base rate changes into account, borrowers making interest-only mortgage payments will be even more exposed to future payment shocks when only repaying the interest on their principal loan amount. These borrowers will not have been chipping away at the equity part of their loans, like those on repayment mortgages, keeping their loan larger than it would have been if they hadn’t taken advantage of the rescue measure.
For the average principal loan amount of £250,000, for example, monthly interest-only repayments on the average UK SVR would be £587, compared to a total interest payment of £323 for a repayment mortgage (plus an additional amount towards paying off the borrowed amount, called the equity).
This is because when repayment borrowers pay interest plus equity, the total interest charged on a mortgage falls as the remaining debt decreases. So while repayment borrowers pay less interest as their equity builds and the principal debt falls, they still have to make higher payments overall.
So, for a three-year fixed rate deal, average total interest payments would be £497 per month for the six months for interest-only borrowers, compared to a similar repayment deal for which total interest payments would be £226. This means the exposure to overpayment when choosing to pay interest-only for the six-month rescue period would be:
Three-year fixed rate 6x(£587-£323) = £1,584
SVR: 6x(£497-£226) = £1,626
That is, choosing to pay interest only for six months could add at least £1,500 to a borrower’s bill over the life of the average home loan versus what they would pay if they remained on a repayment mortgage.
Regional differences will also come into play here when considering exposure to payment shocks and excessive mortgage payments. This is because households in regions with higher house prices borrow larger loans and so repay more over the life of the loan.
So, both base rate changes, but also the negative impacts of the mortgage rescue initiative will disproportionally affect households in areas with higher houses prices, such as London or East Anglia.
There is no straightforward solution to this situation, particularly since mortgage rates operate at the national level. A light-touch intervention, such as temporary caps on lenders’ profit margins could help. For example, if lenders were not allowed to make more than 2 percentage points above the bank base rate for certain mortgage products.
But the government also needs to consider the significant differences in payment shock levels across the country, particularly as it is likely to face a general election by January 2025, if not before. This is important when evaluating the robustness of the economy to recession, which already has an uneven effect on different locations and households.
Alla Koblyakova works as the Property Investment and Finance Course Leader at the Nottingham Trent University
A long-term workforce plan for the NHS – which the UK government promised four and a half years ago – has finally been unveiled. Its arrival, days before the NHS turns 75, is welcomed.
The ambitious plan sets out a 15-year strategy to address the increasing demand for healthcare and decreasing supply of healthcare professionals in England. An investment of more than £2.4 billion has been agreed to fund a 27% increase in training places by 2028-29. The total NHS workforce would grow from 1.4 million in 2021-22 to around 2.3 million in 2036-37.
This investment targets the current shortfall of NHS staff, which has around 150,000 vacancies. This shortfall is forcast to grow to 260,000–360,000 staff vacancies by 2036-37 without any intervention.
The main emphasis of the 151-page plan is on training and increasing the number of healthcare professionals – not only doctors and nurses, but also allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, speech and language therapists and podiatrists, as well as pharmacists and healthcare scientists.
Existing apprenticeships for nurses and other healthcare professionals will be expanded, and a new apprenticeship scheme for doctors will be introduced to meet the required number of 12,000–15,000 medical school places by 2030-31.
New healthcare roles have been promised, including “enhanced practitioners”, who have specific knowledge and skills in a field of expertise, and the more senior “advanced practitioners”, who manage the whole episode of a patient’s care. These posts will combine with the more generalist roles that provide basic care across a range of patients and free up the time of those more specialist practitioners.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the launch of the NHS, we’ve commissioned a series of articles addressing the biggest challenges the service now faces. We want to understand not only what needs to change, but the knock-on effects on other parts of this extraordinarily complex health system.
Retention in the NHS is a considerable problem. The overall staff leaving rate increased from 9.6% in 2020 to 12.5% in 2022. The plan acknowledges the importance of retaining workers, offering them more flexibility, and improving the culture and leadership in the NHS. But details of how this will be achieved are limited in the current plan.
Reform and innovation are also part of the plan to improve productivity by including staff with a more varied mix of skills and expertise within multidisciplinary teams, combining generalists and specialists. For example, a dental practice might have only one dentist, but two dental therapists and two dental hygienists. The therapist and hygienist would do most of the basic dental care, with the dentist intervening when more specialist care is needed.
The plan also draws on the increased use of technological advances to enhance and transform healthcare, such as AI technology, which can decrease diagnostic screening times in radiology.
While the plan is certainly a positive step, it is only the first step in a longer trajectory, setting out clear markers for growth and improvement. Much more detail is needed on how the plan will be implemented and what measures will be used to judge its success.
The emphasis of the plan is on boosting the quantity of staff and services. However, aspects of quality of care, type and level of staffing required and overcoming obstacles to this expansion, need to be explored further, such as the feasibility of shortened medical degree programmes, medical apprenticeships and the student take-up of all the new university places.
The plan acknowledges that NHS staff are working in highly pressured environments and many are exhausted since the COVID pandemic. The recent nursing strikes are not only about pay but also poor working conditions and lack of support and leadership. To make this plan viable, a clearer blueprint on how to retain staff must be included.
Where will this expansion come from? Universities do not always fill their quota of places for some health courses, including nursing, midwifery and allied health professions. It is difficult to see where the students will come from to fill the government’s proposed 92% increase in adult nursing training places by 2031-32 if current places are not being filled.
During the pandemic, people saw the value of working in healthcare as they clapped weekly for those working in the NHS who they regarded as heroes. But this perception of feeling valued in society has not endured in the NHS workforce. More NHS staff are leaving – the overall number rising by more than 25% from 2019 to 2022.
Meanwhile, nurses, doctors and some allied health professionals are taking strike action. About 170,000 NHS workers left their jobs in 2022, more than 41,000 of whom were nurses, the highest rate for a decade.
Improving the culture, wellbeing and work environment of staff in the NHS will lead to people valuing NHS roles and seeing the opportunities they bring. This will encourage people into health and social care careers.
The availability of clinical placements during training is a major obstacle to this ambitious expansion plan, mainly due to the shortage of experienced staff to supervise students. All healthcare courses incorporate “practice-based hours” where students work in a variety of healthcare settings.
This shortage of experienced supervisory staff means that clinical placements are notoriously hard to find and universities are sometimes forced to cut target placement numbers, despite the need, because of a lack of capacity.
Partnership working is essential if the plan is to be successful. Close collaboration between training institutions and NHS trusts will ensure that the appropriate type and number of health courses are offered at the right time and with the right balance of skills.
A closer alliance between schools, colleges and universities will allow students to step on and step off at different points in their learning trajectory, depending on their abilities, experience and choice of occupation. Showcasing the benefits and opportunities of healthcare as an occupation both in primary and secondary school will lead to more people choosing to join the NHS and fill these newly released places.
If working conditions for NHS staff are improved, the current trend of people leaving can be reversed. This, in turn, can lead to a more positive image of working as a healthcare professional in the NHS.
And, combined with the development of more active and well-defined partnerships across education, health and social care, the hope is that more people will opt to enter the health and social care sector.
If all of the above issues are addressed, the ambitious expansion, retention and reform targets of the NHS long-term workforce plan are more likely to be achieved. And in 25 years, at the NHS’s 100th anniversary, the NHS workforce will hopefully meet the healthcare needs of the population.
Victoria Joffe is a professor of Speech and Language Therapy and Dean of the School of Health and Social Care, University of Essex. She has received research grants from the ESRC, The Nuffield Foundation and the NIHR.
The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales was supposed to bring efficiency and investment to a vital sector that had been starved of public funding. But since 1989, the industry has failed to invest sufficiently in replacing antiquated pipes and sewage treatment systems.
Rivers and seas have become increasingly polluted with raw sewage. Meanwhile, dividend payments, funded by water companies loading up on corporate debt, have soared.
The largest of those companies, Thames Water, has debts of almost £14 billion – roughly 80% of the value of the assets of the business. Rising inflation and interest rates mean this debt is increasingly expensive to service, let alone reduce.
If Thames Water collapses, the UK government is likely to step in and manage the company through a special form of business administration to ensure 15 million customers continue to receive their water and sewerage services. But state involvement would probably be temporary, with the aim of an eventual return to the private sector.
Many would see this as a missed opportunity to do things differently. There are already groups calling for Thames Water to be renationalised and brought into public ownership to remove the company’s profit motive and the pressure of paying dividends to shareholders. Instead, the theory goes that, as a local natural monopoly, Thames Water ought to be run as a publicly owned utility fully focused on providing a public service.
But doing this would be far from straightforward. To begin with, it would involve the transfer of corporate debt onto the government’s own balance sheet, which could dramatically constrain spending on other public services, such as the NHS and education.
Another complication comes from the fact that an administration process usually involves attempts to raise funds from the sale of company assets to pay off debts. But in the case of a water company, those assets are part of an integrated and complex infrastructure. It would not be practical to break up those assets if any new company was to go on providing water and sewage services to the public.
Renationalising Thames Water would therefore require the government to buy the assets. But the cost of doing so could be enormous, and the current shareholders would need to be adequately compensated. These include investors like pension funds, which the government would find politically hard to ignore.
And even though governments can generally borrow more cheaply than private sector companies (or even deal with its own debts by printing money), these options are not attractive. They could be inflationary, and would risk a negative response from the financial markets. Renationalistation could end up being seen as an expensive acquisition that brings no new money to improve the water industry.
An alternative would be to sell the assets to a new private company or investor. But existing water companies are unlikely to be considered suitable buyers on competition grounds (and many already face similar problems as Thames Water). Demands for significant future investment to meet tighter environmental standards are also likely to deter other investors.
A more attractive option might be to create a new kind of water provider – a bit like an unusual one that already exists in Wales.
Welsh Water has a unique corporate structure, with no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of its customers. It is commercially run, with professional managers held to account by 62 independent trustees. While not perfect, its performance in recent years compares favourably with that of the other privatised water companies.
Welsh Water’s decisions are made not in the interest of profit-seeking shareholders but in the interests of broader society. Any profits made are either reinvested or returned to its 3 million customers in the form of cheaper services.
Creating such an organisation would not be easy. But there is a precedent in the case of Network Rail, a similar trustee-governed organisation, which was created when its commercial predecessor Railtrack went bust. Railtrack’s debts were subsumed into Network Rail, which were underwritten by the government (while initially staying off the public sector balance sheet). This change in ownership structure led to significant improvements on Railtrack’s atrocious safety record and reduced the cost of rail operations too.
A move towards the Welsh Water model would be in line with recent calls to turn all water firms into democratically run companies focused on public benefit. If renationalisation is considered to be too tricky politically and not viable economically, other solutions are available.
And while it is true that these public-interest companies are funded by debt, a government debt guarantee helps keep the costs of servicing this debt down (while costing the government very little). By not renationalising, the UK economy would avoid many considerable challenges – and a hefty water bill.
J. Robert Branston has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and several other health related charitable organisations. He is a non-active member of the Liberal Democrats.
Phil Tomlinson receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an Interact project on UK co-working spaces and manufacturing.
In the evolving relationship between technology and society, humans have shown themselves to be incredibly adaptable. What once left us breathless, soon becomes integrated into our everyday lives.
The astonishing functionalities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT were, just a few months ago, the epitome of cutting-edge AI. They are now on course to be mere add-ons and plugins to our text editors and search engines.
We’ll soon find ourselves relying on their capabilities, and seamlessly incorporating them into our routines.
Yet, this rapid acclimatisation leaves us with a lingering question: what’s next? As our expectations shift, we are left wondering about the next innovation that will capture our imagination.
People will try to achieve all kinds of smart – and not-so-smart – things with AI. Many ideas will fail, others will have a lasting impact.
Our crystal ball is not much better than yours, but we can try to think about what’s coming next in a structured way. For AI to have a lasting impact, it needs to be not only technologically feasible, but also economically viable, and normatively acceptable – in other words, it complies with the values that society demands we conform to.
There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives.
We will soon see more new versions of AI chatbots based on the latest LLM technology, known as GPT-4. We’ll see AI that can handle different types of data, such as images and speech, as well as text. These are called multimodal systems.
But let’s gaze a little further into the future. Auto-GPT, an advanced AI tool released by Significant Gravitas, is already making waves in the tech industry.
Auto-GPT is given a general goal, such as planning a birthday party, and splits it into sub-tasks which it then completes by itself, without human input. This sets it apart from ChatGPT.
Auto-GPT incorporates AI agents, or systems, that make decisions based on predetermined rules and goals. Despite installation limitations, such an functionality problems when used with Windows, Auto-GPT shows great potential in various applications.
Humanoid robots – those that look and move like us – have significantly advanced since the first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, a contest where teams built robots to perform a series of complex tasks set by the organisers. These included getting out of a car, opening a door and drilling a hole in a wall. Many struggled to achieve the objectives.
However, startups are now developing “humanoids” capable of doing tasks like these and being used in warehouses and factories.
Advancements in AI fields such as computer vision, as well as in power-dense batteries which provide short bursts of high current, have enabled robots to navigate complex environments, maintaining balance dynamically – in real time. Figure AI, a company building humanoid robots for warehouse work, has already secured US$70 million (£55 million) in investment funding.
Other companies, including 1X, Apptronik and Tesla, are also investing in humanoid robots, which indicates that the field is maturing. Humanoid robots offer advantages over other robots in tasks requiring navigation, manoeuvrability, and adaptability because in part, they will be operating in environments that have been built around human needs.
The long term success of these four will depend on more than just computation power.
Humanoid robots could fail to gain traction if their production and maintenance costs outweigh their benefits. AI lawyers and chatbot assistants might possess remarkable efficiency. However, their adoption might be halted if their decision making conflicts with society’s “moral compass” or laws don’t agree with their use.
Striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and society’s values is crucial for ensuring these technologies can truly flourish.
Fabian Stephany receives funding as part of this lectureship via the Dieter-Schwarz-Foundation.
Johann Laux receives funding from the “The Emerging Laws of Oversight” project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The Home Office has revealed how much it believes it will cost to send migrants arriving in the UK to Rwanda – a staggering £169,000 per person. This estimate is even more surprising when you consider that one of the aims of the government’s migration policy is to stop spending billions of pounds on housing refugees in the UK.
Although the Court of Appeal has ruled the government cannot legally proceed with its plan to send deported migrants to Rwanda, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has already said the government will appeal it in the supreme court.
The government has arrived at this £169,000 number from five separate calculations. Each of these is itself wildly uncertain and, as the government’s own assessment notes, does not include a wide range of other costs that are sure to emerge. That implies that the true cost per head is likely to be even higher.
The largest component of the £169,000 is £105,000 for “third country costs”. This is the amount the government believes it will have to pay to cover the costs incurred by a third country like Rwanda to host a refugee if they cannot be returned to their home country.
The calculation is based on a National Audit Office estimate of the cost of hosting Syrian refugees in the UK. This was published in 2016, at the beginning of the programme to take in Syrian refugees and so is itself a forward-looking estimate. The NAO itself recognised that the actual cost was “uncertain”.
To reach £105,000, the government has taken the estimated average cost per refugee coming to the UK in 2016 (£17,340), multiplied it by five and transformed it into 2023 costs. This was based on the Syrian resettlement scheme lasting five years – but there is no explanation as to why they assume someone deported from the UK would need support for that period.
A presumably more accurate estimate of these costs has recently been agreed in the partnership signed with Rwanda but the government has not published this figure, deeming it “commercially sensitive”. Publishing a figure that the UK will use in all future agreements (still to be negotiated) will result in this being used as a minimum starting point by any other third-country negotiators.
“Flight and escorting costs” are estimated at £22,000 per person. This is based on an “uncertain assumption” that 50 people will be deported per flight, which is extremely optimistic. In 2022, an average of 25 people were on each deportation flight out of the UK and most of these were to European destinations, which are easier logistically and cheaper than other third countries outside of Europe. And that only includes flights that took off.
Another element of the calculation is “Home Office resource costs”, estimated at £18,000. This is probably the most accurate component of the cost estimate, since it is based on current average legal costs of appeals. Still, this figure does not include costs to retrain Home Office officials or related capital costs for things such as building new detention centres.
The final two costs are more problematic. The figure of £7,000 for detention assumes 40 days between arrival and deportation. The inaccuracy of this figure may be judged by the 374 days that the passengers on the inaugural flight to Rwanda have spent in detention between June 14 2022, when the flight was cancelled, and the judgment on June 29 2023 that Rwanda deportations cannot go ahead.
Finally, £1,000 for “Ministry of Justice costs” includes only the costs of legal aid, not all of the other costs incurred by the Ministry of Justice to hold legal proceedings.
The final hole in these calculations comes from the recognition that this cost is only for those who are successfully deported and does not include those who, for whatever reason, remain in the UK.
Usually, economic impact assessments lay out the financial cost of legislation as a whole. So it’s notable that we’re now getting a “cost per head” of the proposed policy.
But the most surprising element of the impact assessment of this policy, as immigration expert Lucy Mayblin has pointed out, is the Home Office’s frank admission that it has no idea how the bill will work once it becomes law.
The document itself states that this is “a novel and untested scheme, and it is therefore uncertain what level of deterrence impact it will have”.
In other words, the government does not know if people will stop trying to enter the UK if they know they could be deported to Rwanda or another third country on arrival. That uncertainty around how many people are implicated makes it impossible to calculate a total cost. And given the limited success of deterrence tactics so far, it seems entirely plausible that the eventual cost will be much higher.
Michael Collyer is Chair of Sanctuary on Sea, the Brighton and Hove branch of City of Sanctuary. He is also Chair of the Independent Advisory Group on Country of Origin Information, within the Office of the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. Both are voluntary positions. This article is written in a personal capacity. He currently receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant numbers ES/T008067/1 and ES/T004509/1).
The UK’s housing stock is old, energy inefficient and heavily reliant on fossil fuel heating systems – mainly gas boilers. With heating responsible for 17% of the UK’s carbon emissions, homes and their central heating must transform if the country is to achieve net zero by 2050.
While there isn’t a single solution that will suit every home, government advisers on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimate that 8 million heat pumps need to be installed in existing homes by 2035.
The CCC recently published a damning assessment of the UK’s progress towards its 2030 climate goals, saying annual emission reductions outside the power sector must nearly quadruple. Home heating is of particular concern, as heat pumps are being rolled out at one-ninth the rate they need to be by 2028, alongside falling rates of energy efficiency improvements.
Heat pumps extract heat either from the air, ground or nearby water and transfer it into a building, providing heating and hot water through pipes and radiators. Some heat pumps can even work in reverse to cool homes during the summer.
Heat pumps run on electricity and use energy three times more efficiently than gas boilers.
Better still, UK homeowners are becoming more comfortable with this technology. A survey of 2,500 households in May 2023 revealed that more than 80% that had installed a heat pump were satisfied.
Only 59,862 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2022. Although this is an increase of 40% on 2021, it’s far from the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028. To fully replace all of its gas boilers, the UK would need to be installing 1.7 million heat pumps annually by 2036.
Heat pumps are being rolled out faster elsewhere. In Norway, 60% of buildings have heat pumps; in Sweden, over 40%. Meanwhile, less than 1% of UK buildings had a heat pump in 2021. And compare the UK’s 2022 record with other countries in Europe: France installed 462,672 heat pumps (up 20%), Germany 236,000 (up 53%) and the Netherlands 123,208 (up 80%).
European governments support heat pump installations in various ways. The Netherlands has gradually raised taxes on homes burning natural gas for heating and offered subsidies for heat pumps. France has combined a 30% tax credit on improvements to heating and home insulation costing up to €16,000 with a 0% interest loan of up to €30,000 for energy efficiency upgrades.
These measures address two things which prevent people from getting a heat pump: the upfront cost of installation and the renovations required to prepare a home. Heat pumps are becoming cheaper but they are still more expensive than gas boilers and many UK homes lack the double-glazed windows, insulated walls and lofts, and pipework and radiators that help them perform optimally.
Since 2012, government policy has failed to drastically improve home energy efficiency or encourage low-carbon heating.
The carbon emissions reduction target introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2008 required energy suppliers to cut emissions by helping customers make their homes more energy efficient. When it closed in 2012, it had beaten its target of saving 293 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. 41% of these savings came from installing insulation, in turn making homes more suitable for a heat pump.
The green deal followed in 2013 and the renewable heat incentive in 2014 under David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Green deal loans for energy-efficiency upgrades attracted just 14,000 applicants as homeowners baulked at the relatively high cost of borrowing and were unconvinced by the projected energy savings. The scheme was scrapped in 2015.
The renewable heat incentive paid homeowners quarterly over seven years for installing a heat pump but asked them to fund the installation upfront. In 2018, the government blamed high upfront costs, poor awareness and complex installations for the poor uptake. The incentive ended in 2022.
Launched in 2022 under Boris Johnson, the boiler upgrade scheme offers homeowners a £5,000 grant to replace their gas boiler with an air-source heat pump (£6,000 for a ground-source heat pump) and aims to lower the cost difference between the two. Installing a new combi-boiler costs between £600 and £2,150 whereas a heat pump is £5,000 to £8,000 after the government subsidy.
The government also plans to implement a clean heat market mechanism that will ask boiler manufacturers to sell four heat pumps for every 100 gas boilers in 2024/25, or pay for the equivalent in heat pump credits if they can’t (one heat pump credit is worth £5,000).
These measures may improve on earlier failures if the rules for industry are clear and the incentives are generous enough for consumers to consider investing in a heat pump, as examples with other low-carbon technologies have shown.
For instance, evidence suggests carmarkers are already selling more battery-electric vehicles in anticipation of a law requiring them to sell a rising proportion of zero-emission vehicles each year from 2024. And the feed-in-tariff scheme requiring energy suppliers to buy electricity from homeowners at an agreed price for 10 to 25 years helped nearly a million households install solar panels.
Beyond targets for boiler manufacturers, the UK government will ban natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2025. While Germany’s governing coalition is implementing a ban on installing gas boilers in existing properties from 2028.
Before such a ban is tabled in the UK, there are policies that could raise the dismal heat pump installation rate. First, like the Dutch, the UK could gradually lower taxes on residential electricity and increase them on gas.
Second, the government could ensure energy performance certificates more accurately assess the energy efficiency of homes and their readiness for heat pumps. And third, the government should dismiss opposition from boiler manufacturers and implement the clean heat market mechanism.
Decarbonising heat and encouraging heat pumps is essential for achieving net zero. Tighter rules and targets for industry must sit alongside attractive incentives for consumers if the UK is to reach 600,000 installations a year in five years’ time.
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Ned Lamb is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council's Low Temperature Heat Recovery and Distribution Network Technologies (LoT-NET) programme.
The oldest outdoor swimming pool in the UK – the Grade II listed Cleveland Pools in Bath which first opened in 1815 – will reopen during the summer of 2023, after significant restoration. With a new 50-metre outdoor pool having opened in Brighton) in June and a council-funded restoration under way in Hull, the simple pleasure of the public outdoor pool is seeing a return to popularity to the UK.
In the early 20th century, an explosion of new outdoor pools opened across Britain. Taking the name “lido” from the Italian word for coastline, the boom of construction in the 20th century was part of the post-war public works programme, which aimed to create jobs and promote health. While indoor pools had been gender segregated, public lidos were deliberately mixed and became synonymous with fun and socialising.
Lidos at coastal towns such as Scarborough and Blackpool were destinations for residents and tourists. Lido design between the 1920s and 1940s was innovative and drawn from exotic sources, such as European resorts and cruise ships. They incorporated sumptuous sundecks, sophisticated outdoor restaurants and cafes, alongside vast inviting bathing areas. Impressive diving boards challenged those brave enough to leap theatrically and please the crowds. These lidos were able to accommodate thousands of visitors as wholesome, accessible leisure destinations.
Some of the most iconic lidos are the magnificent art deco sites in Saltdean, Plymouth and Penzance in the south of England. These stunning sites have thankfully been saved from demolition, many others were not. Lido lovers remain hopeful that another art deco site, Broomhill in Ipswich, will one day be restored.
Lidos were grand constructions and monuments of civic pride, both for those who created them and for those who frequented them. They reflected times of change in society and great optimism. At their peak, there were more than 300 active public outdoor pools in the UK, with 11 in Liverpool and 68 in London.
The 1960 Wolfenden report, Sport and the Community and the 1968 Sports Council report Planning for Sport were catalysts for the demise of outdoor swimming pools in policy. The mandate was that “as a general rule, [pools] should be indoors”.
Lidos fell into disrepair and were steadily replaced or destroyed, after councils no longer saw them as part of their leisure facilities and reduced or stopped funding. At the turn of the century, only around 130 public outdoor pools remained, predominately in the south of the UK. That number hardly changed in the following two decades.
The steady loss of these lidos didn’t go unnoticed. The Thirties Society’s report Farewell my Lido (1991) and then Janet Smith’s important 2005 English Heritage-funded book Liquid Assets (with a forthright foreword from artist Tracey Emin) document the history and argued passionately for a brighter future for these much-loved public luxuries.
But as local councils faced financial crises in 2008 and central government reduced spending further from 2010, leisure was treated differently. Responsibility for lidos was transferred to charitable trusts. Those that remained were preserved and saved by community groups or trusts and some local authorities, who understood their public value.
During the last two decades – and recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic where outdoor swimming was one of the few activities allowed for a while – there has been a steady growth in outdoor, wild and lido swimming.
And there are cultural markers of a resurgence, too. Fashion label Radley created a limited-edition lido handbag in 2016. In 2019, crowdfunding helped create The Lido Guide. The same year, a heart-warming novel, The Lido by Libby Page, beautifully captured the community spirit, history and value of lidos.
Photographer Christopher Beanland paid homage to lidos in 2020 through a global collection of outdoor pools and their stories. And then this year, Brit Pop band Blur choose the iconic 2014 Martin Parr image of a solitary swimmer in Gourock Pool for the cover of their upcoming album, The Ballad of Darren.
Over 30 lido schemes have emerged from 2021 onwards. They’ve been nurtured by the Future Lidos Group and their National Heritage Lottery funded pooling resources project. The design emphasis is once again on innovation, taking the lessons of lido heritage and the human connection which formed in these inclusive sites into consideration.
If Sport England’s policies can recognise the diverse value of lidos to public health and leisure, the next decade could see a further resurgence in restorations. Even more lidos could soon be making a welcome return across Britain, allowing more access to outdoor swimming – whatever the weather.
Michael Wood founded the Future Lidos Group in 2021 and is a volunteer on the steering committee for the Pooling Resources project. The Pooling Resources project received funding from National Heritage Lottery Fund in January 2023 to create a toolkit to support the restoration and creation of lidos. He has been a volunteer with the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool for 9 years. He has not personally received any fees for any of this work.
Around 2% of adults worldwide suffer from a condition called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (Nash), an advanced form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. This occurs when fat builds up in the liver, causing inflammation and scarring.
Without treatment it can eventually lead to liver cirrhosis – and it can also increase the risk of other serious health conditions, such as heart disease.
There is currently no medication to treat Nash. Since excess fat in the liver is what causes the inflammation and scarring that is characteristic of the condition, the current mainstay treatment for patients is weight loss.
However, the kind of weight loss most people are able to achieve on their own is modest and not enough for significant reductions in liver fat and change inflammation and scarring.
But our recent study has shown that rapid weight loss achieved through the “soups and shakes” diet – which is commonly used to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes – may be able to reduce the severity of Nash.
To conduct our study, we recruited 16 participants with obesity, Nash and moderate to advanced liver scarring. Five of the participants were female and 11 were male. Most participants were white.
All of the participants took part in the “soups and shakes” weight loss programme, replacing their regular meals with specially formulated soups, shakes and bars for 12 weeks. They consumed four products of their choice daily, which provided them with about 880 calories and all the essential vitamins and minerals.
After the initial 12-week period, they gradually began re-introducing regular food to their diet over the next 12 weeks. They were also given regular support from a dietitian to keep them on track and motivated throughout the 24-week study.
At the start of the study, participants were weighed, had their blood pressure taken, blood tests done and two scans that measured the health of their liver. These scans estimated how advanced their liver inflammation and scarring was and the amount of fat in their liver.
These tests were also repeated at 12 and 24 weeks – with an additional blood test done at four weeks.
Fourteen of the participants completed the 24-week study. Participants lost an average of 15% of their body weight, showing they largely adhered to the weight loss programme.
Our study also showed that the rapid weight loss was safe for participants. In the past, this kind of diet programme wasn’t recommended to Nash patients due to concerns over how safe it may be. The most common side effect patients experienced was constipation – but this was temporary and typically only mild.
Scans also showed that most participants had significant improvements in liver fat and in markers of liver inflammation and scarring.
These are some of the largest improvements in liver disease severity reported in research to date, approaching the level of improvement seen with weight loss after bariatric surgery. No trialled medication has shown such a large improvement.
While some weight regain is likely to happen, if participants are able to maintain at least most of their weight loss after the study ends, this could possibly reverse the trajectory of their liver disease.
What’s more, systolic blood pressure and haemoglobin A1C (a marker of blood sugar control) also significantly improved in participants who’d had hypertension and type 2 diabetes at the start of the study. This may suggest that the programme could be used to reduce the risk of heart disease, which is the most common cause of death in people with Nash.
Because our results are only from a small study, further research is needed to test this programme in a larger trial with more diverse participants and a control group. It will also be interesting to see whether this programme could be useful for patients suffering with more advanced forms of liver disease – such as liver cirrhosis.
But it is promising to see from our study that the diet appears to be safe for people with Nash and effective in improving their liver health.
Dimitrios Koutoukidis receives funding from National Institute of Health Research. The intervention was donated to the University of Oxford by Nestle Health Science with dietetic support provided by Oviva. Perspectum donated the MRI analysis. None of these associations led to payments to the author.
An Islamic State-linked group in Uganda attacked a school in June, killing more than 40 people, mostly students, in what seems to be an escalating trend of terrorism against schools. The attackers set fire to school dormitories and used machetes to kill and maim students.
This was the latest in a cycle of shocking attacks on schools around the world. The Nigerian group Boko Haram infamously kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in 2014, and it has attacked other schools throughout the country.
Many more attacks have occurred since then. In Afghanistan, IS affiliate IS-K has repeatedly bombed educational institutions in recent years, often killing dozens of children or teens. In 2020 in Cameroon, sources suggest that separatists fighting for their own, independent state attacked a bilingual school, killing eight children.
Why would a group carry out such an attack, killing schoolchildren? These attacks are happening more frequently in recent years, and they also tend to be carried out by particular types of groups.
I recently co-wrote a book, Insurgent Terrorism: Intergroup Relations and the Killing of Civilians, with political scientists Victor Asal and R. Karl Rethemeyer, examining the use of terrorism (intentional civilian targeting) by rebel organisations in civil wars. We dedicated a chapter to understanding attacks on schools and discovered a few patterns.
First, attacks on schools are on the rise. In the years examined in our book, 1998-2012, we found a marked increase starting in the late 2000s during civil wars. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there fewer than 20 attacks per year on schools by rebel organisations. But between 2009 and 2012, there were more than 90 such attacks per year.
Examining more recent data on terrorism generally, and not only during civil wars, we see a similar increase starting in the late 2000s. The graphic below shows a massive increase in terrorist attacks on schools.
Terrorist attacks on schools, 1970-2020
The annual average number of terrorist attacks on schools in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Global Terrorism Database, was less than 60. In the 2000s, the average year saw nearly 80 school attacks. In the 2010s, there was an average of 250 terrorist attacks on schools per year. After the early 2010s peak, the number of attacks started to decrease, but numbers are still far above what they were in the 1990s or early 2000s.
The increase in terrorism against schools is in part because influential global networks such as al-Qaida and IS seem to encourage it, but also because groups learn from others that this is a good way to bring attention to their cause, to force a government to give in, or to intimidate a rival community.
Read more: Nigeria's new national security bosses: 5 burning issues they need to focus on
A second pattern we noticed was that the organisations that carry out these kinds of attacks tend to have a few attributes in common. Groups that attack schools tend to be in alliances with other rebel or terrorist organisations. These alliances provide extra resources to groups, which are essential for large-scale attacks. For example, allies might provide explosives, vehicles or recruits. Cooperative relationships with other rebels can also contribute to heinous attacks because groups learn tactics from each other, and they might pressure each other to use extreme tactics.
This seems to be the case with the group behind the recent Uganda attack, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). It has been cooperating with IS since 2017 and has received funding from it. The funds and propaganda support seem to have enabled ADF to carry out increasingly vicious attacks. Additionally, other IS-affiliated groups have attacked schools, so it is possible that the main IS encourages this, or that the groups are learning from each other.
We found that groups that had recently been subjected to government crackdowns were more likely to subsequently target schools, while groups that had recently received government concessions didn’t attack schools the following year. This is consistent with other research finding that government repression of religious freedom seems to lead to terrorist attacks on school.
The Uganda school attack, where boys and girls were killed and buildings set alight with people inside, was apparently intended to send a message to the government and its president Yoweri Museveni. Victims reported that the attackers said: “We have succeeded in destabilising Museveni’s country.”
Interestingly, in our research, we did not find that religiously oriented groups, such as Islamist groups, were more likely than other types of groups to attack schools. Certainly, some Islamist groups have carried out these attacks – such as the recent Uganda school killings.
IS-K’s attacks are intended to intimidate the mostly Shia Hazara minority community, consistent with IS-K’s extreme religious views. But non-religious groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Communist Party of India (Maoist), have also repeatedly attacked schools.
Overall, attacks on schools occur because militant organisations see that they bring a great deal of attention – including from international news media – to their cause. Terrorism is fundamentally violent propaganda, and groups that use terrorism constantly innovate, seeking new tactics to help them stand out. They also hope the increasingly extreme methods will pressure governments to give up.
It seems likely that terrorist attacks against schools are going to continue. Governments should prioritise safeguarding educational institutions, and the international community should work harder to prevent these kinds of attacks.
Brian J. Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Data collected by an observatory in Antarctica has produced our first view of the Milky Way galaxy through the lens of neutrino particles. It’s the first time we have seen our galaxy “painted” with a particle, rather than in different wavelengths of light.
The result, published in Science, provides researchers with a new window on the cosmos. The neutrinos are thought to be produced, in part, by high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays colliding with other matter. Because of the limits of our detection equipment, there’s much we still don’t know about cosmic rays. Therefore, neutrinos are another way of studying them.
It has been speculated since antiquity that the Milky Way we see arching across the night sky consists of stars like our Sun. In the 18th century, it was recognised to be a flattened slab of stars that we are viewing from within. It is only 100 years since we learnt that the Milky Way is in fact a galaxy, or “island universe”, one among a hundred billion others.
In 1923, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble identified a type of pulsating star called a “Cepheid variable” in what was then known as the Andromeda “nebula” (a giant cloud of dust and gas). Thanks to the prior work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, this provided a measure of the distance from Earth to Andromeda.
This demonstrated that Andromeda is a far away galaxy like our own, settling a long-running debate and completely transforming our notion of our place in the universe.
Subsequently, as new astronomical windows have opened on to the sky, we have seen our galactic home in many different wavelengths of light –- in radio waves, in various infrared bands, in X-rays and in gamma-rays. Now, we can see our cosmic abode in neutrino particles, which have very low mass and only interact very weakly with other matter – hence their nickname of “ghost particles”.
Neutrinos are emitted from our galaxy when cosmic rays collide with interstellar matter. However, neutrinos are also produced by stars like the Sun, some exploding stars, or supernovas, and probably by most high-energy phenomena that we observe in the universe such as gamma-ray bursts and quasars. Hence, they can provide us an unprecedented view of highly energetic processes in our galaxy – a view that we can’t get from using light alone.
The new breakthrough detection required a rather strange “telescope” that is buried several kilometres deep in the Antarctic ice cap, under the South Pole. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a gigatonne of the ultra-transparent ice under huge pressures to detect a form of energy called Cherenkov radiation.
This faint radiation is emitted by charged particles, which, in ice, can travel faster than light (but not in a vacuum). The particles are created by incoming neutrinos, which come from cosmic ray collisions in the galaxy, hitting the atoms in the ice.
Cosmic rays are mainly proton particles (these make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons), together with a few heavy nuclei and electrons. About a century ago, these were discovered to be raining down on the Earth uniformly from all directions. We do not yet definitively know all their sources, as their travel directions are scrambled by magnetic fields that exist in the space between stars.
Neutrinos can act as unique tracers of cosmic ray interactions deep in the Milky Way. However, the ghostly particles are also generated when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. So the researchers using the IceCube data needed a way to distinguish between the neutrinos of “astrophysical” origin – those originating from extraterrestrial sources – and those created from cosmic ray collisions within our atmosphere.
The researchers focused on a type of neutrino interaction in the ice called a cascade. These result in roughly spherical showers of light and give the researchers a better level of sensitivity to the astrophysical neutrinos from the Milky Way. This is because a cascade provides a better measurement of a neutrino’s energy than other types of interactions, even though they are harder to reconstruct.
Analysis of ten years of IceCube data using sophisticated machine learning techniques yielded nearly 60,000 neutrino events with an energy above 500 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Of these, only about 7% were of astrophysical origin, with the rest being due to the “background” source of neutrinos that are generated in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The hypothesis that all the neutrino events could be due to cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere was definitively rejected at a level of statistical significance known as 4.5 sigma. Put another way, our result has only about a 1 in 150,000 chance of being a fluke.
This falls a little short of the conventional 5 sigma standard for claiming a discovery in particle physics. However, such emission from the Milky Way is expected on sound astrophysical grounds.
With the upcoming enlargement of the experiment – IceCube-Gen2 will be ten times bigger – we will acquire many more neutrino events and the current blurry picture will turn into a detailed view of our galaxy, one that we have never had before.
Subir Sarkar received funding from the University of Oxford to support his participation in IceCube.
Riots broke out in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, following the lethal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy named as Nahel M. An investigation into his death is ongoing but the situation has already triggered protest and anger. Whatever the investigation concludes, the incident forms part of a complex, deep-rooted problem in France.
It raises the memory of the violence that spread across the city’s suburbs in 2005, lasting more than three weeks and forcing the country into a state of emergency. Many of the issues behind the unrest back then remain unresolved to this day and have potentially been aggravated by ever worsening relations between the police and the public.
During my extensive fieldwork in the suburban estates of Paris, Lyon and Marseille I have seen and heard first-hand the grievances that are now being cried out on the streets of Nanterre.
Certain suburbs of large French cities have, for decades, suffered from what has been labelled the worst “hypermarginalisation” in Europe. Poor-quality housing and schooling combine with geographical isolation and racism to make it virtually impossible for people to stand a chance at improving their circumstances.
Evidence has long shown that people living in poor suburbs can expect to face discrimination based on the very fact of living in those suburbs when they apply for a job. Even just having a certain name on your CV can rule you out of employment thanks to widespread racial discrimination.
Discontent among young people in these places has been brewing for decades as a result. The first riots of the kind currently happening in Paris took place in Lyon as far back as the 1990s.
And yet, outside moments of crisis, there appears to be practically no discussion by French leadership about how to tackle the problems that drive so much anger in the suburbs.
President Emmanuel Macron presents himself as committed to re-industrialising France and revitalising the economy. But his vision does not include any plan for using economic growth to bring opportunity to the suburbs or, viewed the other way round, to harness the potential of the suburbs to drive economic growth.
In two presidential terms, he has failed to produce a coherent policy for solving some of the key problems of the suburbs.
Police brutality is a topic of great concern in France at the moment, beyond the Nanterre incident. Earlier this year, international human rights organisation the Council of Europe took the extraordinary step of directly lambasting the French police for “excessive use of force” during protests against Macron’s pension reforms.
Policing appears stuck in an all-or-nothing approach. In a recent interview I helped conduct for a documentary in the suburbs of Marseille, residents pointed to successive cuts to community based police officers, based in the estates, as key reasons for increases in tension between the population and the police. Protests, meanwhile, are met with tear gas and batons.
Successive governments have used policing to control the population to prevent political turmoil, eroding the legitimacy of law enforcement along the way.
And yet, the police are extremely hostile to reform, a stance that is aided and abetted by their powerful unions and Macron himself, who needs the police to crush opposition to his reforms.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy is infamous for inflaming tensions during the 2005 riots by referring to the people involved as “scum” who needed to be pressure washed from the suburbs. Macron, too, has been repeatedly criticised for striking an arrogant, tone during his political career, making numerous gaffs including suggesting an unemployed worker only needed to “cross the street” to find work.
However, his consiliatory response to the death of Nahel could not be further removed from Sarkozy’s stance. He has called the killing “inexcusable” and held a crisis meeting to seek a solution to the crisis.
A trip to see Elton John perform while the riots occurred was perhaps not advisable and comments about young people being “intoxicated” by video games were somewhat misguided, but Macron has at least tried to calm tensions and not inflame them.
A key problem for him, however, is the diffuse, de-centralised nature of the protestors. There is no leadership to meet and negotiate with, and there are no specific demands that need to be met to defuse the tension. As in 2005, the riots are occurring spontaneously, sometimes estate by estate.
That makes escalation very difficult for the government to stop. And it underscores the need for a far more wide-reaching, thoughtful response to tackle the entrenched, decades-old problems of poor social prospects and police brutality in the suburbs of French cities.
Joseph Downing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has told the recently opened COVID-19 Inquiry that the UK’s pandemic planning was “completely wrong”. According to Hancock, the doctrine was “to plan for the consequences of a disaster” rather than stopping or containing the virus in the first place.
While there is truth in this claim, it doesn’t give us the whole picture. Hancock was repeatedly asked during his appearance about something called Exercise Cygnus. In 2016, the UK government engaged in a series of exercises including Cygnus to assess their preparedness and response to a pandemic outbreak of influenza.
As the global scale of the COVID pandemic was starting to become apparent in the first half of February 2020, the UK applied the lessons from these exercises to plan for a wide range of scenarios. Based on the scientific evidence available at that time, they anticipated that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” could involve up to 80% of the UK population being infected (with only 50% of those infected showing symptoms). However, it was hoped that the majority of cases would have relatively mild disease.
This information was contained in planning assumptions labelled “officially sensitive” that were shared between a range of healthcare authorities and that I had access to at the time. Some of the figures were also published in the media.
The concept of “herd immunity” played a key role in the existing mathematical models. Herd immunity is the idea that once a sufficiently large proportion of the susceptible population is infected and subsequently acquires immunity, the whole population becomes protected. The thinking was that herd immunity for COVID might be achieved once 80% of the UK population had been infected, or perhaps even earlier.
Underlying all this was the assumption that, in the absence of effective vaccines at that time, the case fatality rate from the new virus (the proportion of infected people who end up dying) would not be so high that herd immunity could only be achieved at the cost of many lives.
Unfortunately, the actual COVID mortality figures – first from China, then other east and southeast Asian countries, and by the second half of February 2020 also from Italy – showed that the initial case fatality rate of COVID was much higher than had been modelled in the UK scenarios.
Without effective vaccines, any attempt at herd immunity had to be abandoned as too many people would have died in the meantime.
The assumption that any new viral pandemic would develop along similar lines as previous influenza pandemics was arguably the key flaw in the UK’s planning doctrine.
Countries that had been significantly affected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2002–2004 – principally China but also other Asian countries – didn’t make the same mistake. Those countries recognised important biological similarities between COVID (or SARS-CoV-2) and SARS (or SARS-CoV-1) and quickly took action against COVID by means of intensive testing and quarantine policies.
In contrast, the UK lost valuable time between mid-February and mid-March while COVID cases and subsequent deaths were rapidly beginning to rise. The effect on older adults and other vulnerable people in UK care homes was especially severe.
In the end, the UK’s first wave of COVID was only slowed and eventually stopped by the introduction of a lockdown in the fourth week of March 2020.
Hancock’s statement raises a key question about the extent to which errors in the UK’s pandemic planning could have been foreseen at the time. Notably, the UK’s healthcare planning authorities could have taken a wider view of the potential nature of viral pandemics.
The earlier Sars outbreak had been largely confined to China, although it spread to more than 20 other countries through worldwide air travel, and was contained within a few short months. Therefore, the risk of future outbreaks of this type in the UK was regarded as relatively low. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to include the global re-emergence of a Sars-type virus as one of the possible, albeit more extreme, pandemic scenarios analysed in the UK’s planning exercises in 2016.
Even given the wrong assumption regarding the nature of the new virus, some issues could have been anticipated better. For example, it was well known that the supply chain for personal protective equipment (PPE), which is vital for health and care staff, had become increasingly dependent on low-cost suppliers in China. If the UK’s pandemic planning exercises had taken a more global perspective, the breakdown in the PPE supply chain in the spring of 2020, which caused huge financial waste (and apparent corruption), could have been better anticipated.
Other questions, such as when effective COVID vaccines would become available, were much harder to predict.
Read more: How to prepare for a pandemic
In sum, no planning exercise can cover all eventualities. But a key requirement for policymakers should be to learn as fast and effectively as possible while events unfold.
The business concept of “dynamic capability” – that is, an organisation’s ability to configure and reconfigure its assets, processes and capabilities so as to respond effectively to rapidly changing external circumstances – is useful here. Building and strengthening this capability should be a prerequisite for policymakers and planners in government.
In regards to Hancock’s comment that the planning was “completely wrong”, one could say that the UK plans were indeed flawed in their key assumption (of an influenza rather than a coronavirus pandemic), but also that policymakers should have learned the true nature of the new virus more quickly than they did.
Robert Van Der Meer receives funding from NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Golden Jubilee and the Scottish Government.
The British Museum has had to apologise after a translator’s words were used without permission. Writer and translator Yilin Wang shared on Twitter that their translations of work by the Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin appeared in the museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, without consent.
The museum’s subsequent press release cited “unintentional human error”. It explained that it had corresponded privately with Wang and had now offered a fee for the use of the translations. Along with the Chinese poems, these were then removed from the exhibition. But the removal of the texts has also fuelled criticism of the museum, and sparked a debate about the role of translators.
Literary translation is legally recognised as an act of original artistic production. This means that translated literary texts enjoy their own copyright status, independent of the source texts. While Qiu’s work is now out of copyright because she died in 1907, Wang’s translations are not.
The role of original creativity in translation practices is frequently ignored or underestimated. It’s common to talk about reading “author X” rather than “translator Y’s translation of author X”. Even the Nobel Prize conveniently sidesteps the role of translators and their creative work when it confers its annual literary honour.
Recently, however, literary publishing has increasingly recognised the role of translators. In 2016, the International Man Booker Prize announced it would now split winnings evenly between the author and the translator. Translators are gaining visibility and it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend they don’t exist.
Read more: International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books
Translations are creative acts that take place in specific cultural contexts. They transform source texts into new, original literary works, and they can advocate for the source text and writer by introducing them to new readers.
Wang has written about the power dynamics of literary translation, including the barriers to access and participation faced by translators who are “outsiders” and translators of colour. In their essay writing, they draw specifically on their experience of systemic prejudice while translating Qiu Jin’s poetry.
They describe translation as an act of “reclamation and resistance” – and talk of the barriers they and others face finding a career in translation.
Like a translation, a museum is not neutral or objective. The objects and texts on display have been deliberately selected and positioned together. Just like the objects they frame, the words in a museum belong to someone and they have been chosen to tell a particular story.
Museums increasingly face pressure to reflect on their processes of acquisition and their contested ownership of items. This latest mistake – and handling of the fallout – shows that they also need to be transparent about the origins of the words they use to build the stories they tell.
Removing items from display is not standard practice for the museum. The museum made a public statement in 2020 that it would not remove “controversial objects” from display. A section of the website dedicated to “contested objects” explicitly engages with the provenance of some of its most famous pieces, such as the Parthenon marbles.
But now Wang has described the museum’s response as “erasure”, and Wang argues, it has troubling implications, both for the museum’s critical engagement with its own curatorship and for the power dynamics of its relationships with non-white contributors.
The British Museum said in a statement: “In response to a request from Yilin Wang, we have taken down their translations in the exhibition. We have also offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgement of their work.” Wang contests this.
Meanwhile, the story has not gone away. It has been reported in the Chinese and French media, and Wang’s still developing Twitter thread about the discovery has been shared over 15,000 times.
As momentum grows behind the criticism of the museum, it is a good time for all of us to consider how we value and engage with the work of translators, whose creative labour allows us to access worlds and imaginations far beyond our own.
Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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