Fertility rates, R&D and mental health
Plus a new piece for Pattern, and a link to a bonus acrostic
A little while ago I visited Emmaus North East for Pattern. It’s a community in South Shields for formerly homeless people, which provides them with a place to live and with work, either in the Emmaus community itself or in one of a set of social enterprises attached to it.
I spoke to a number of the staff, as well as several of the companions - as the former homeless people are known.
They were generous sharing their time, and their stories.
“If it wasn’t for Emmaus, I would never, ever work again. I’d probably still be doing the same crap I was doing. I thought I was happy enough on the dole doing what I was doing, which was nowt. But, I obviously wasn’t happy.”
Mostly what the companions valued was stability, support and - most importantly - the hope and opportunity that came with a stay with Emmaus. They told me it helped them rebuild confidence, reconnect with who they were and what they did well. Including for Brian, in the pics above, who was a trained chef and was back in a kitchen after a decade away and realising what work could do for him.
Give the full piece a read here.
The North East total fertility rate was 1.47 in 2022
The ‘total fertility rate’ is the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime, and that number was 1.47 in the North East in 2022. Only London and the South West had lower rates.
Nationally the average was 1.49, down from 1.55 in 2021.
In fact, in the national figures it’s been falling since 2010, when it stood at 1.94. It’s never been this low before, not even during the Second World War. It was above 2 children per woman from 1943 to 1973, getting up near 3 in the mid-60s.
Looking at the national age breakdowns, you can see there’s actually quite a few things in play.
Through the 90s and 00s, there were more than 40,000 children a year born to mothers under the age of 20, in 2022 there were fewer than 15,000.
That’s a policy win.
Well done contraception, sex education and more sensible young people.
There are other trends too.
You have to use soft eyes, but here’re the figures from 1995 to 2022.
So…
under 20 = 42,000, down to below 15,000
20-24 = 130,000 down to 73,000
25-29 = 217,000 down to 157,000
30-34 = 181,000 up to 207,000
35-39 = 65,000 up to 121,000
40+ = 11,000 up to 31,000
We’re having fewer children overall, and we’re having them in our 30s and into our 40s.
That might be good news in some respects…people are healthier, more empowered to start families when they want to.
But, I’d suspect it also says a lot about precarious work, precarious and expensive housing, precarious and expensive childcare, and concerns about pay gaps, career prospects and the motherhood penalty.
Thoughts very welcome in the comments on this one.
£732m in North East R&D expenditure
The latest figures on business research and development expenditure are out.
In the North East, that amounted to £732m, which is 1.5% of the UK total.
There were also 12,000 jobs associated with R&D, which is 1.8% of the UK total.
That’s by some margin the lowest of the English regions, and were it to mirror population it would be about 3%.
But, we under-perform on most enterprise measures - we have a lower business density figure too, with 704 per 100,000 population, compared to 861 in the North West and 862 in Yorkshire and Humber.
There are some fantastic business support programmes in the region, including those focused on innovation and its ecosystem - you can read about one of them, Challenge North Tyne, in another piece I did for Pattern last year - but it’s clear more needs to be done.
Better coordination, better funding, better everything, as we look to push up productivity and grow the region’s economy without (as was made clear in the birth rate bit) adding more people.
Young people, education, work and mental health
The Resolution Foundation had a report out this week addressing the impact of mental health on young people’s prospects for work and education.
They found one in three (34%) people aged 18-24 reported symptoms of a common mental disorder like depression or anxiety, up from one in four (24%) in 2000.
One in five (21%) aged 18-24 with mental health conditions were out of work, compared to the 13% who were workless without mental health conditions.
There’s a link with education, as poor mental health has gone up faster in university settings than elsewhere, and 79% of young people who are out of work due to illness have qualifications at GCSE or below. Among that age group more generally, it’s just 34% who have only that level of qualification.
Now, I don’t have a particular North East angle to this - I’d be reaching to give you some statistics, because we just don’t get a good enough breakdown.
What I will say is generally, if this is a problem nationally, it’s a problem here and probably a worse problem, given we have a higher economic inactivity rate, lower average qualification level and a greater propensity towards poor mental health (and the drugs, alcohol, self-harm and suicide which goes with it).
Again, thoughts most welcome in the comments.
Budget warning
It’s the Budget next Wednesday, and it appears we are to expect more tax cuts - possibly to National Insurance - and not much else.
I’ll be in The QT this lunchtime with some regional asks of the Chancellor - you’ll be able to find it here from around noon (£).
For next week’s newsletter, as it’ll be the morning of the Budget, I’ll do a little round-up of all the North East relevant rumours and announcements I’ve seen.
What I’ve been reading this week
Reading Football Club have received another two point deduction due to mismanagement of finances by the club's absentee owner Dai Yongge. Much of the frustration from the fans is now being redirected towards the English Football League, who insist on giving the club points deductions the owner doesn't care about, and fines he won't pay, rather than working with government to take decisive action to force a sale. I enjoyed, therefore, the response from protest group Sell Before We Dai, where they managed to put together a fairly coherence response to the new sporting sanctions, while also working in an acrostic reading “Fuck The EFL”.
Beyonce has a country music album in the works, which has riled up some people. I’m of the opinion that people can do whatever they want, and Beyonce is more than capable of putting together a collection of country songs which meet the criteria of ‘three chords and the truth’. Especially given the calibre of musician she can gather around her, including Rhiannon Giddens, a multi-Grammy award winning, Pulitzer Prize totting banjo player, who is in the Guardian talking about all this. She says: “Genre, on the other hand, is a product of capitalism, and people with access to power create it, control it, and maintain it in order to commoditise art.”
What to look out for in the next week or so
PMQs later on
The rail minister Huw Merriman is up infront of the Transport Committee at 9.30, talking about things including HS2
A&E wait times data, also this morning at 9.30
Data on civil partnerships in 2022, out tomorrow
Data on trade in goods in 2023, out on Friday
Also on Friday, data on trust in government during 2023
Keep an eye on the papers over the weekend for Budget policy weather balloons…policies they throw out there to see how people react, before frantically rewriting or denying they ever existed
Working with me
I’m now pretty much booked up through until well into April, but last minute slots do open up.
Get in touch to chat about bits I might be able to help with from May onwards, or any urgent last minute bits.
You can find out more about me on my website.
You can email me on worroom@substack.com or arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk
I’m @arlenpettitt on Twitter, and you’ll find me on LinkedIn.
The fertility and birth rate figure are so interesting, because there's the idea that people simply cannot afford to have more children, although like John says below, this counteracts what we know about poorer people having more children. Also, good point about contraception, and the idea that maybe women don't want to have as many children anymore - either because of their own ideals or because of the mental load - and now we are able to decide that for ourselves.
Well, since you asked. The birth rate figures are fascinating. There are two distinct trends revealed by BBC a soft eyed look. The three columns to the right show growth across the period. The three to the left turn around dramatically at 2010-ish. There was a big public policy effort made on teenage pregnancy in the mid 2000s (I was there) - soft measures , joined up thinking, and afterwards the ‘hard’ economic trends identified in article. Which was more effective? Who can tell - but the work on teenage pregnancy didn’t stop in 2010 and any impact on that front will flow through to the older bands, ultimately supporting the growth in the three right hand columns. To some extent the suggestion of economic squeeze factors driving early reproduction trends is counter to what we know historically - poorer people had more children, and still do in subsistence economies. There is a ton of work to be done in this area to establish some evidence behind the trends, which will hopefully happen. As somebody who believes good policy and systematic education matters I have to have some faith in its success - but faith supported by evidence is better - it would be good to see it proved.