Blighty

Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2010 for the first time in 20 years, according to a report released this week by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Emissions, which had been declining sharply since the financial crisis began, rose by 3.1%. That’s disappointing and concerning by any reckoning.

Britain is still on track to meet its target under the Kyoto protocol, by which it pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by 2020, compared to 1990 levels. That is no reason to feel comfort about this news. Most climate scientists agree that the cuts under Kyoto are nowhere near enough to limit global warming to within 2 degrees. And Britain’s emissions calculations ignore the ones it has “exported” to other countries since 1990, most importantly the manufacturing and heavy industry that once accounted for a large chunk of Britain’s emissions and has since moved overseas, now belching out noxious substances elsewhere.

It is worrying that even with that industrial trend, Britain’s emissions are now rising again. The details of why this is so provide more cause for concern.

Ed Davey, the new energy secretary, blamed “the exceptionally cold weather and greater use of fossil fuels” for the surprise leap. He is right that 2010 was a particularly cold year, so people used more fuel. Other sectors were largely unchanged. But what this reveals is how great a problem Britain faces in cutting its emissions in the future.

Britain’s aged housing stock is a huge problem in any efficiency drive or attempt at cutting demand. Sure, there are still a lot of lofts to be lagged, draft excluders to be bought and people need to change their habits—and wear more jumpers—rather than automatically turning up the heat another degree.

But there is an underlying problem, which is that old houses, which many of Britain’s are, are often very draughty. Windows sag over 150 years, window frames loosen, walls move and doorways slip. And the technology of building insulation is simply much better now than it was in the past. Even energy companies agree that attempts to retrofit insulation can only do so much.

That doesn’t mean that every effort should not be made to upgrade the housing stock. But its limits need to be acknowledged. Britain’s strict conservation rules mean that for many houses, the type of windows cannot be changed without planning permission (and that may well be refused) which means there are millions of houses with very pretty—but rather ill-fitting—sash windows that can only be double-glazed with difficulty and huge expense, for example.

Flank walls are a problem too. Fitting an additional insulating layer several millimetres thick is disruptive, expensive and makes living space smaller (though only a bit). It would help. But it is hard to convince people that it is worth it.

For some homes, fitting brilliant insulation will repay the benefit within a few years in saved bills. That won’t work for all. Those nice, high-ceilinged Victorian houses and converted flats have a lot of air to heat. Floorboards need to be taken up to lag every pipe. The obstacles are huge. Not all of them will be overcome.

In addition, climate scientists reckon that the greater variability of weather systems over the past decade or so is also due to increased carbon dioxide and other planet-heating gases. That means more extreme weather is on the way, so Mr Davey’s “exceptional” 2010 may turn out to be more of a common occurrence. This will happen again.

The other reason why emissions increased is that Sizewell B, Britain’s biggest nuclear reactor, was offline for six months. That contributed to an increase of around 4% from electricity generation. Nuclear naysayers will use this to reject nuclear energy as a source of power. In fact this highlights the importance of having a good energy mix. Britain is overly dependent on Sizewell B because it is the only nuclear reactor of its kind in the country. What the country needs is a much better energy mix—of which new nuclear may well be a part.

There’s a further note. Recession had dented emissions rather sharply. Many experts had already acknowledged that the decline in emissions would slow when the economy improved. What these new figures show is that this decline reversed even while the economy has been apathetic at best. At some point it will perk up properly. That means a lot more noxious substances will find their way into the atmosphere.

The Climate Change Risk Assessment issued this week is a brave document. Put out by Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), this report claims to be the first attempt by government to assess the “potential risks and opportunities” for Britain arising from climate change. 

It’s that word “opportunities” that makes this study courageous. Few organisations willingly talk about the upsides of climate change — though it is inevitable that some people and even some countries will be advantaged by the effects of global warming, even if the overall global impact is vastly more detrimental.

So what are those upsides? Summers and winters will be a little warmer; the Med could become too sweaty for many, so Britain should pick up more tourist dollars (its seaside towns will need to pick up their act, though). Blueberries should be able to grow in Britain — and other foodstuffs that don’t work so well at the moment. Melting of Arctic sea ice could open up new shipping routes to Asia and the Pacific.

Some of these are bigger benefits than others. But the good thing about pointing out such things is that, unlike much reporting of climate change, which lays itself open to accusations of presenting only one side of the story, this document identifies many of the possible effects, good and bad. (Climate sceptics would still think this an unbalanced report, as it follows the prevailing vast body of scientific evidence that global warming is a real and present danger.)

But blueberries and suntans will not compensate for the far greater havoc global warming will wreak in Britain. Flooding already causes £1.3 billion of damage a year; by the 2080s this could rise to anything from £2.1 billion to £12 billion, the report predicts. More than 27m may have limited access to clean water by the 2050s. Sewers will fill more often, and rotting waste will pour into rivers and the sea; viruses and bacteria will thrive in the heat. And though cold winters get press coverage as the poor and elderly shiver in their homes, in fact over-warm summers are a far bigger health hazard already — that will only increase. Britons will also use ever more energy in cooling their homes.

On balance, the risks Britain faces from global warming vastly outweigh the benefits. Defra's findings in this survey are perhaps not that surprising, but they are sobering, as are the number of people and sums of money involved. Eating blueberries while sunbathing in the Lake District may sound like fun. But all holidays must come to an end — and the rest of the picture looks pretty bleak.

EARLY next month Lord Justice Leveson, who has spent the past three months scrutinising the wicked British press, proceeds to examine the relationship between the press and the police. Today there came an early hint about just how ugly the revelations from that phase of the inquiry are likely to prove.

Last July reporters at the Guardian newspaper broke the story that the News of the World had got hold of messages left on the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a girl who disappeared in 2002 and was subsequently found to have been murdered. This, and a catalogue of other awful revelations, brought down the News of the World, at the time Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper. 

The Parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee has now released a letter from Surrey police, which was investigating Dowler’s disappearance. This details the police force’s early contacts with the News of the World. The letter says nothing about an issue that has preoccupied the London media village for the past month or so—whether the Guardian was correct in reporting that Dowler’s voicemails had been deleted, giving false hope to her parents that she might be alive. But it does reveal something just as shocking.

On April 13th 2002, according to the coppers, they were told that the News of the World was in possession of voicemail messages from Dowler’s phone. The police were also told the contents of those messages. The News of the World was then following what turned out to be an unfruitful line of investigation—that Dowler had registered with an employment agency. And how had the News of the World got hold of these messages? Because, it was explained to the police, the newspaper had obtained Dowler’s phone number and PIN code from other school children. 

On April 20th an e-mail to the police helpfully summarised the situation. “As you are aware, last Saturday evening (13 April) the News of the World contacted the Dowler squad with information we had received,” the e-mail stated. “In the course of a conversation with [a police officer] we passed on information about messages left on Amanda Dowler’s mobile phone”. The email went on to explain that the newspaper had offered to supply a tape recording of the messages “and other evidence”. 

Liberal use of a redacting black pen means it is difficult to ascertain who was speaking to the police. What is not difficult to ascertain is the significance of what the coppers were told. Accessing someone else’s voicemail messages is a crime. (When the police wanted to listen to Dowler’s messages, they obtained a court order.) Surrey’s police were told that the News of the World had obtained voicemail messages left on Dowler’s phone, were told what they contained and were given the opportunity to listen to them. Apparently, they did nothing.

MOST of the newspaper folk who have testified to the Leveson inquiry into the British press, set up in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, have been rather supportive of the inquiry’s aims. Although they have strongly defended free speech, they have tended to concede that some form of stricter newspaper regulation is in order. A few have the zeal of converts to the regulatory cause. And then there’s Richard Desmond.

Mr Desmond, who owns the Daily Express and the Daily Star newspapers, testified this afternoon. The effect was akin to one of those strings of small explosives that, when your correspondent was a child, friends would occasionally smuggle into the country from France. His competitors are “idiots”, he explained. He attacked the Daily Mail, calling it the “Daily Malicious”. He called the inquiry “the worst thing that’s ever happened to newspapers” and suggested he would very much like to be rid of it. He complained bitterly about the former chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, whose name nonetheless slipped his mind.

There was a particularly splendid moment when Mr Desmond was reminded that Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine disappeared in 2007, had objected to fully 38 stories published in one of his newspapers over a four-month period. Mr Desmond apologised for that. But he went on to calculate that (since the newspaper was running roughly one story a day) it had probably published something like 65 stories in those four months that were not objectionable. That’s more than half of the total.

Mr Desmond also explained why he has so little time for the Press Complaints Commission, which regulates newspapers and is now, in the wake of the phone-hacking revelations, broadly regarded as toothless. It had “scapegoated” his newspapers, explained Mr Desmond. He spoke of the PCC as a particularly useless variety of trade association. Why had his papers withdrawn from the PCC? For the same reason that he might, in theory, one day decide to leave Britain—because he did not respect its laws and institutions.

Unlike Paul Dacre, the editor of Mr Desmond’s least favourite newspaper, the owner of the Express and the Star did not come to the Leveson Inquiry with a fully worked-out defence of the industry, or even of his own publications. He could not come up with a convincing explanation of how they ought to be regulated. Much of what he said was unimpressive. But Mr Desmond can run a newspaper profitably (something that is beyond some of those who have testified to the inquiry) and he is a crucial figure precisely because of his contempt for regulators. If the Leveson inquiry cannot come up with a form of regulation that Mr Desmond either wants to submit to or is forced to submit to, it will fail.

In this series of blog posts, an administrator at a Greater London hospital reports on what life is really like inside the National Health Service

 THE health secretary’s recent proposal to lift the cap on private patient income for NHS foundation trusts worries me. It is not the economic arguments which I find concerning: a nifty source of extra income for cash-strapped hospitals would be useful, though some seem to think it would cause the death of the National Health Service. Rather I worry that it would lead to NHS patients being seen less promptly in hospitals that took large numbers of paying customers.

Private patients have long been treated alongside NHS ones: my own department sees a few private patients every week, and the care it offers to NHS patients does not suffer as a result. But if the proportion of private patients substantially increased, that could change. 

The basic problem is that private patients are treated differently (in every sense) to those on the NHS. It doesn’t matter how stringent the rules are about care being assigned according to need and people not being allowed to jump the queue just because they have money, it doesn’t work out like that. 

My department’s official policy, for example, is simply to see patients as soon as possible, with the most clinically urgent cases given priority. There are some spare appointments to fit in anyone who needs to be seen at short notice (inpatients, for example), and if a doctor wants a private patient seen then we will squeeze them in if we can, but we won’t bump anyone else down the list so the private patient gets seen quicker. Simple, relatively efficient and fair.

At least, that is the theory. And most of the time, that is what we actually do as well. But when they are treating a private patient doctors are more pushy than they are when treating an NHS patient. I would estimate that consultants are perhaps two or three times more likely to chase up whether a private patient has been given an appointment than if the patient is being treated on the NHS.

Sometimes, if my department is busy and the waiting time is longer than normal, a consultant will pop into the office and casually mention that they believe we might have a private patient of theirs on our list and they would appreciate it ever so much if we could find a way to get them seen promptly. Only rarely will a doctor overtly say they want a patient to be seen faster because he is a paying customer, but that is the direction I am being nudged in.

And sometimes, because it is the path of least resistance, the nudging works and a private patient is seen quicker than would been the case had we been left to our own devices. When the number of private patients is relatively small the impact of this on other patients is minimal, but if private patients constituted a substantial proportion of the people being seen in our department, the pressure to bump NHS patients down the list could be considerable. 

So if the NHS is to take more paying customers, I think we need to introduce stronger measures to ensure that patients are treated according to clinical need rather than ability to pay. At the moment, when money talks, it is hard not to listen.

BRITAIN'S excitable press sometimes gets into a flap over odd issues. One recent example is the Daily Telegraph, Britain's best-selling broadsheet. Last Friday, as David Cameron announced that Britain and the euro zone would part ways—normally fertile ground for the right-wing rag—it splashed on the story that an examiner had advised teachers "you don't have to teach a lot" to pass the tests set by the exam board for which she worked. Today, as the same examiner was hauled in front of the Commons select committee on education, its main headline was "Teachers giving students exam questions".

Concerns about how England's exam system works are long-standing: the Commons committee's ongoing investigation into the administration of examinations was initiated some time back. Nor is the concern limited to the English system, the committee is looking outside England and the Daily Telegraph also recorded an examiner from the WJEC, the Welsh exam board, as saying, "We're cheating." Part of the reason is the inexorable rise in exam passes. Ever since the system was reformed in 1988, school children have been graded by their absolute rather than their relative performance. When the reforms were enacted, roughly 5% got the top grades. Over the past ten years, the proportion gaining the highest marks has doubled from 9.4% to almost 20%.

A second reason is gripes from university tutors and employers, who reckon that school leavers are not as accomplished as they used to be. Even the most selective universities now provide remedial courses to address the gaps in the knowledge of their newly recruited undergraduates. Meanwhile the Confederation of British Industry frets that poor standards of English and maths among school leavers could hinder economic growth.

At the select committee today, Steph Warren, a former geography teacher who was filmed implying that the exams set by Edexcel, her employer, were easy, set out to explain her position. She had been quoted out of context, she said. The film was made at the end of an exhausting training day during which she had been berated by teachers for setting an exam that their pupils had found difficult. That was why she had suggested that "you don't have to teach a lot".

But the scandal has raised some valid questions about who are the customers in the marketised system. During the 1950s, when the O-level and A-level examinations were first devised, they were offered exclusively by universities. That actually made far less sense then than it does now: in 1950 just 3% of young people went to university; today some 45% of youngsters enrol.

Yet following the 1988 education reforms, the university boards lost out to new competitors. Some merged, some folded. The four main exam boards in England and Wales now comprise a department of the University of Cambridge, a profitable company and two charities.

In the interests of transparency, I should disclose that the company, Edexcel, is itself owned by a publisher, Pearson, which, through its ownership of the Financial Times, also owns a stake in The Economist. That said, Pearson has never, to my knowledge, tried to influence the editorial content of this newspaper. And The Economist itself has its own educational venture: successful completion of a course will gain you a certificate of achievement signed by John Micklethwait, the editor of The Economist, no less.

In today's Daily Telegraph, an anomymous examiner is quoted as saying that the "cause of the rot, ultimately, is competition between exam boards". I think there is some truth in that remark. The problem with the existing system, as I see it, is that the exam boards do not see universities as being their customers. Rather, the customers are mostly school teachers. And, naturally enough, teachers want to enter their pupils for exams that they will pass. Instead of harnessing market forces to drive up standards, the system does precisely the opposite. It should be reformed to incentivise a race to the top.

One way to do this would be to give universities a stronger role in setting school-leaving exams. However universities are not as saintly as they like to pretend: grade inflation is also rife in higher education. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the proportion of students who gained a first-class degree now stands at 14%, up from 10% a decade earlier. In some institutions, the proportion is far higher.

So my suggestion is that universities should be given a greater say in judging the ability of school leavers, but that employers should also be given a greater say in judging the ability of university graduates.

THE white noise of hysteria provoked by David Cameron's veto at last week's European summit will come to look bizarre and irrelevant if, as is still possible, the single currency does not survive for much longer in its current form. The ultimate purpose of the summit was to shore up the euro in the short term, and to make it durable in the long term. It is hard to find any neutral observer who is confident that either has been achieved. Indeed, much of the reaction to the prime minister's veto could be summarised as, "This is a lousy treaty, Mr Cameron, why didn't you sign it?"

For the time being, though, the prime minister's decision is causing convulsions at home. Nick Clegg, his Liberal Democrat deputy, has abandoned his initial support for the veto for a splenetic denunciation of it. He is "bitterly disappointed" with the outcome of the summit, which leaves Britain in danger of being "isolated and marginalised", all thanks to a combination of Franco-German intransigence and Mr Cameron's failure to stand up to eurosceptics in his own party. I was asked about the implications of Mr Clegg's remarks for the coalition on BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour. My testimony was bleak.

Senior Conservatives, who have come to expect a burst of outrage from their coalition partners every few months (whether over tuition fees, the NHS, voting reform or Europe), think that this outburst can be contained. I doubt that.

As the Spectator's James Forsyth put it to me, this is not a time-limited row. The tuition-fees policy has been implemented, for better or worse. The referendum on the alternative vote has been lost. Those battles are over. Europe, by contrast, is the issue that never dies. In the coming years, Tories will implore Mr Cameron to make good his veto by preventing the new group of 23/26 from using EU institutions, resisting the financial regulations they cook up and sketching out a journey to some kind of a referendum on Europe. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems will, with equal vigour and the backing of many Foreign Office mandarins, pressure Mr Cameron to effectively un-do the veto by making conciliatory concessions to the 23/26 and plotting a path back into their grouping. The scope for friction within the coalition, a kind of war of attrition, is almost unbounded. 

Also, the behaviour of senior Lib Dems is setting dangerous precedents for the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility. Vince Cable has been allowed to get away with public criticisms of Tories in the past but Mr Clegg's words today were far more provocative. He was essentially implying that Mr Cameron is a weak leader, cowed by his party (a view not so much implied as mega-phoned to the nation by Lord Ashdown today, who said that even John Major stood up to the "bastards" in his cabinet). Again, some Tories hope that the only precedent being set here is that Lib Dem ministers can, within reason, say things that Conservative ones cannot. But what if the precedent actually being set is that any cabinet member can say almost anything without losing his post? Imagine a cabinet in which eurosceptics such as Iain Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson feel as emboldened to speak out as Mr Clegg and Mr Cable. We are not far away from that now, judging by recent days.

There is very little sympathy for Mr Clegg among senior Tories. "What did he expect?" asked one I spoke to. "The PM said on Monday that he would use his veto if the deal wasn't good enough." (Of course, Mr Clegg claims that he would have somehow struck a better deal but, say the Tories, he was privy to the government's negotiating strategy and did not complain.) They also find it rich of Mr Clegg to accuse Mr Cameron of placating his own party. They suspect that the Lib Dem leader's hostile rhetoric today is aimed at quelling unease among his MPs, MEPs and Lords. 

It is customary at this juncture to point out that the Lib Dems, who are struggling to stay ahead of the UK Independence Party in the polls, will not do anything to provoke a general election before 2015. But why do we always assume that it is the Lib Dems who get to decide whether the government lasts? What if the Conservatives themselves decide to pull the plug and go to the country? I am not for a moment predicting that this will happen, or suggesting that it is being contemplated in the upper reaches of the Tory party. Nevertheless, it is a prospect that deserves to be entertained more seriously in the media coverage of the coalition. It will be very, very difficult for Mr Cameron to contain the coming war of attrition between eurosceptic Tories and europhile Lib Dems. Opting for an election, even against a leader of the opposition as weak as Ed Miliband, would be a titanic risk. But what if the alternative is carrying on with a government that is not under the prime minister's grip? I suspect that Mr Cameron, a proud man who watched from close quarters as the previous Conservative prime minister wielded office but not power, would rather take his chances than tolerate that.

We are not anywhere near that stage yet. Mr Cameron is still a dominant prime minister, sometimes effortlessly so. And, for the record, I still think the coalition will last five years. But, to put a crude number on it, I was 80% sure of that last week. I am now only 60% certain.

BRITAIN has long been an unequal society, and in recent years the gap between rich and poor has grown ever wider. Today a report published by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, shows that worldwide the distribution of income—as measured by earnings and investments plus benefits, after tax, and adjusted for household size—is more unequal than ever before. It also claims that in Britain income inequality rose faster between 1975 and 2008 than in any other OECD member country. 

According to Michael Förster and his colleagues, who conducted the research, the top 10% of high-earners have incomes that are 12 times that of the bottom 10% in Britain, up from eight times in 1985. But it is not just unequal societies that have become more so: even in saintly Sweden, inequality has increased markedly over the past three-and-a-half decades. And the trend has continued through good economic times and bad, seemingly immune to booms and busts.

Why might this be? Mr Förster points to the rising incomes of extremely high-earners, which in Britain are mostly bankers and some medics. Income from investments does not account for great wealth: the richest are those who have high salaries and big bonuses. And, while they pay proportionately less tax than they did in the 1980s, they still fork out a lot. Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies reckons that more than a quarter of state revenues from income tax come from the top 1% of earners.

Income inequality has also increased as a result of longer working hours. In Britain, both low- and high-earners are spending more time at work than they did a few decades ago, but the wealthy have extended their working hours by more than lower earners. And about half of the increase in individual earnings inequality is due to more people becoming self-employed on low earnings, according to Mr Förster.

Does inequality matter? The authors of “The Spirit Level”, which caused a stir when it was published in Britain in 2009, argue that unequal societies are worse for being so. Yet some of the links between inequality and the ills attributed to it that they made were weak: strip out America’s high murder rate (which many would blame on guns, not inequality) or Japan’s longevity (likewise on diet, not inequality), and flatter societies no longer look so much healthier.

Perhaps the main reason for concern is political. Annual polls taken by the British Social Attitudes survey since 1983 show that about three-quarters of people consistently think that the gap between rich and poor is too wide. And more than half think the state should do something about it.

Last week I went to see one of the construction sites where the new Crossrail route will run, a commuter service that will flow east-west through London, from Maidenhead to Shenfield. It is due to open in 2018 and is an extremely ambitious project. It aims to increase the rail capacity of London by 10%, and to bring a further 1.5m people within 45 minutes of the centre of the capital.

The biggest construction project currently going on in Europe has a price tag to match: £14.5bn. In fact, £1 billion was taken off the cost when the coalition took power: it negotiated a later completion date in order to save that money. But it is still an extraordinary sum.

I saw some of the reasons for this when I visited Royal Oak in west London. This is the spot where the train will go down a ramp and underground, across the capital. The ramp has already been built, and you can see the “eye” of the tunnel: the circle where the tunnel boring machines will carve out a 6.2m-wide hole. That is due to start in spring 2012. In advance of that, the ground is being prepared so that when the giant drill gets started, none of the other structures in the area will move.

This is a tricky spot for construction work. The Westway flyover is right next to the site, so its foundations are very close to where the tunnel will be. On the other side run mainland trains and also the Hammersmith and City tube line. And that’s just the obvious stuff. The construction team are also diverting a sewer that runs in this area, and they have to make sure gas mains and cables are not disturbed by the works.

Boring tunnels underground is a huge feat of engineering. But it also requires an astonishing amount of preparation. It’s a big job even if there aren’t other things to take care of. But when you’re burrowing underneath a very densely populated city, complete with its densely populated communications and utility network, not to mention worrying about housing foundations, noise and local communities, a lot of work, effort — and yes, money — are taken up with such things.

Crossrail is just one example of what such work requires. On such a densely-populated island, most infrastructure projects are on brownfield sites, rather than starting in pastures new. That’s usually the right thing to do: infrastructure is already in that place for a reason, and there’s little point using a greenfield site unless a very definite business case can be made for it. But it means that any project, however simple, is likely to stumble over a lot of other networks on the way.

That is not the only reason such programmes are so pricey, of course. Infrastructure UK, a body within the Treasury charged which is helping private sector companies invest, says that project costs in Britain are “excessively high”. In a government-commissioned study of the rail industry which came out in May, Sir Roy McNulty found that costs in Britain were 40% more than elsewhere in Europe. Some of the reasons for this in the rail industry are quite distinct: incentives are misaligned and elements of the franchising system does not encourage efficiency, for example. Sir Roy reckoned that tackling the many “barriers to efficiency” could bring down costs by 20-30%.

A separate report by Infrastructure UK in December 2010 suggested came up with further suggestions for what raises costs for other sorts of infrastructure works in Britain. Labour and commodity prices are high, but comparable to other parts of Europe. But some projects are started before the design was complete, says Infrastructure UK, many schemes are over-specified and too many bespoke designs are used. On this last, in Madrid, for example, subway stations all look the same, whereas Britain tends to use distinctive architecture for each one. That is more fun, but is a lot more pricey. There were other interesting notes: British construction companies tend to be smaller than their European counterparts, for example, so a scheme of work may involve several teams at different stages, rather than a single company which can project-manage more efficiently over a longer time.

One of the main causes pinpointed was the stop-start nature of investment programmes and the lack of a clear programme of future work – on November 29^th the Treasury issued a National Infrastructure Plan with a £250 billion shopping-list of projects, which aims to address precisely this point. The government hopes that tackling some of these problems will bring costs down: it is aiming for £2-3 billion a year. Having seen the Crossrail construction site, though, I suspect a comparable hastening of projects may be too much to hope for.

ALARMING as it might seem, today's announcement that the number of university applicants is in steep decline is no cause for panic. The figures, published by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), are admittedly shocking: the number of people seeking a full-time place starting in 2012 is down by 13% compared with this time last year. But there are good reasons why this might be so and, despite claims to the contrary from the teaching unions, it has precious little to do with students from poor families being deterred by the prospect of increased student debt.

When Tony Blair's government first introduced annual tuition fees of £1,000, soon after winning election in 1997, there was a flurry of activity as potential students cancelled gap years to get into university while it was still free. Applications surged, then fell back a little when fees were applied in 1998. But thereafter their numbers recovered strongly.

Then Mr Blair allowed universities to treble the maximum annual fee to £3,000 in 2005 (all but one did so). The same pattern was repeated: the number of applications rose prior to the fee hike, then fell back slightly the following year, before rising again.

So it would be reasonable to expect the same thing to happen when the coalition government raised the maximum permitted annual fee to £9,000 from 2012. In fact, circumstances conspired to drive up demand for a university place to unprecedented levels in 2011. The economic downturn increased the appetite for higher education, as people sought to sit out the doldrums in college rather than on the dole. Population growth combined with rising exam pass rates added to the pressure. And a backlog of candidates clamouring for university places emerged.

Delve deeper into today's statistics and you can see that it is this backlog that has lost interest in university: those aged 20 and over. Indeed the three oldest age groups profiled each record drops of more than 20%. And it is older applicants, who typically already hold the qualifications that they hope will win them a university place, who are most likely to apply early in the applications cycle: the deadline for applications for entry in September 2012 is still six weeks away.

The picture for school pupils is completely different. The number of 17-year-olds who have applied is down by less than 1%. And while the number of 18-year-olds shows a more significant decline, it may well be that they are taking more care over their applications than in previous years, particularly as the cost is about to escalate. Take into account, too, that the number of school-leavers is falling, and will do so for years to come.

Indeed bright young things who seek an education at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, or to study medicine, dentistry or veterinary science, had an earlier application deadline of October 15th. Data released soon afterwards showed their numbers were down less than 1% on the previous year. 

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours at an undergraduate open day held at London South Bank University. None of the potential students I spoke to was in the least bit deterred by the increased fees. Each intended to make a decision on where to study based on the content of the course provided, rather than its cost. And the university is not noted for attracting only the well-heeled: 98% of its undergraduates come from state schools, compared to 89% for Britain as a whole.

Another reason to doubt that increased tuition fees are to blame for a slump in demand is that the number of Scottish students seeking a university place in Scotland (and who will not be charged fees, thanks to the vagaries of the higher-education funding system) has fallen by 16%. A similar patten is seen in the number of students from Wales wanting to study in the principality, and the number of students from Northern Ireland wanting to study in the province. 

Scroll to the charts near the bottom of the data sheet, and you can see that interest in a university place for 2012 is within a hair's breadth of where it was in 2010. And there is still time for demand to recover: Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS, says the organisation is "gearing up for a possible late surge close to the January 15th deadline where applicants have taken more time to research their applications".

A CHILL wind sweeps the land: Britain is set for another recession. Growth targets look certain to be downgraded as Britain's strong banking and trade links with its neighbours see it sucked into a Europe-wide downturn. The nation looks likely to enter a long period of malaise.

If people seem relatively unconcerned about the nation's economic prospects, according to the latest The Economist/Ipsos-MORI poll, it is only because it was conducted between November 11th and 17th, before the extent to which the country's entanglement in the unfolding euro-disaster became apparent. And the results are hardly upbeat: although concerns about the state of the economy were down six percentage points, the issue remained the nation's primary concern and has topped the worry list for the past three years, ever since Britain last slid into recession at the end of 2008. Almost two-thirds of those polled rated it as being one of their main concerns.

Meanwhile fears about unemployment have risen two percentage points to their highest in 13 years. The poll was taken just weeks after youth unemployment passed the one million mark, and it identifies how unemployment is a greater concern for young people than it is for oldsters: 43% of 18- to 24-year-olds mentioned it as one of their most prominent worries, compared to 27% of those who had reach retirement age. Overall a third of adults were troubled by it. Unease about unemployment looks set to continue because joblessness tends to outlast economic recessions.

And anguish about the euro has resurfaced—rightly—as a top-ten worry for the first time since June 2005. 

It is all rather gloomy. To quote the 19th-century English poet Thomas Hood: 

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, 

No comfortable feel in any member—

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, 

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—

November!

Alas, that which ails Britain will not pass with the month.

THERE has been a lot in the news this week about petrol prices. That is partly because they are very high—currently £1.34 a litre, not far off their May peak. It is also because a frenzy of anger is being whipped up about them, in the hope that when George Osborne, the chancellor, makes his autumn statement on November 29th he will announce a freeze in fuel duty, or even a cut.

It is unlikely that will happen. Fuel duty is a very good way for the government to make money—it accounted for 5% of the government’s total tax take in 2009/10. And the chancellor has already put off one set of price rises: in March, he cut duty by a penny a litre, and delayed the next inflation-linked rise until January.

Amid the hoo-ha about petrol, price and how hard up everyone is right now, it is easy to miss the benefits of the tax: as an environmental tax, it works impressively well. The behaviour of car drivers has changed a lot in the past few years, and that has much to do with the high prices and other government incentives. 

A survey by British Car Auctions, a lobby group, this week issued a press release about a survey they had done, saying that half of respondents felt that at some point rising fuel prices would “force” them to change to a more efficient car or alter their driving habits. They made it sound like a bad thing. Job done, I’d say—people should be more discerning about which journeys it is really necessary to do by car and whether there are alternatives. 

The statistics on buying new cars bear out the idea that people really are making different choices. In the year to date, cars in the lowest three emissions brackets (out of 13) made up 28% of all new cars, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. That compares to 20% of sales in 2009, and 11% in 2008. It is an encouraging trend.

There are a number of different incentives to increase fuel efficiency, not all as good as each other. The previous, Labour government-sponsored car scrappage scheme in 2009/10 was a bit barmy: it was a good idea to get rid of some old belchers, but ridiculous to encourage people to buy new cars when a second-hand car might still have been a big improvement. But the vehicle excise duty is a good idea—it’s an annual tax on cars, but the rate paid depends on the efficiency of the engine. That, along with high fuel prices, seems like an appropriate dovetailing of incentives to get a better car next time.

The problem with these statistics, like all data, is that people don’t have to pay for the average, they have to pay for what they have. So if someone has an old, inefficient car but can’t afford to replace it, or doesn’t want to because building a new car actually involves a lot of carbon too (often more than extending the life of a gas-guzzling vehicle), then they are stuck with paying very high prices for a car that gets through a lot of fuel. 

That is why I am encouraged by the fact that people are also changing how they drive, as well as what they drive. Every year since 2007, people have been driving less by car and van.  

I hope that trend will continue. I don’t deny that many people have to use a car a lot of the time—to get to work, to ferry their children around, to do the shopping or to visit family. But 23% of car trips are less than two miles, so some of those could surely be avoided.

The number of people driving their children to school has increased, according to the Department for Transport. Cars taking children to school now account for 16% of the morning peak hour traffic (8-9am), up from 10% in 1995/7. That’s partly because people live slightly further from school than they did a decade ago—but only slightly further. It should come as no surprise that Britons are also fatter now than they were a decade ago. There is a correlation.

The debate on fuel duty in the House of Commons this week droned on for hours and hours. That is because high petrol and diesel prices affect every constituency and so every MP. So many turned to up show that they were making representations from their local members. That’s fair enough. But even if Mr Osborne does delay January’s planned price rise of 3p a litre, fuel will still be very pricey. Oil prices and petrol taxes are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future and not much can be done about that. So if people want to pay less for fuel, something else will have to change.