Five highlights from the Trinity Mirror data unit this week: the housing crisis, the gender pay gap, and young people out-of-work

Here are five things we’ve been up to this week.

1 The soaring cost of homes for the homeless

There’s a lot of talk of a housing crisis in the UK — and I have a problem with that.

It’s not that I think everything is fine. Clearly, it isn’t. Rather, my problem is that there are lots of different things wrong. And a solution to one isn’t necessarily a solution to another.

This week I read this story in the Guardian saying the city I live in — Manchester — is currently building zero affordable homes (that figure is highly problematic, and disputed). And I read this companion piece, by someone who wants to live in the city centre, but can’t afford it.

The fact is, Manchester is building affordable homes — just not in huge volume, and not in the city centre. It is true that the city centre is becoming increasingly unaffordable to anyone who isn’t on a salary at least twice the average wage. That is a problem, I suppose; although it’s fair to point out virtually no one lived in the city centre as recently as 1990, and it hasn’t proven a particular popular place for families to live since then. It’s not like Manchester doesn’t have other “unaffordable” places, too (Didsbury, Chorlton: I’m looking at you).

The point is, it’s only one problem, and it’s not the problem I think of when I hear the words “housing crisis”.

The more pressing problem, for me, is the problem of rising homelessness, which has two aspects. One is a lack of genuinely affordable housing (as opposed to housing classed as “affordable” by the government’s entirely relative definition of “80 per cent of market price”). In particular, councils aren’t building or acquiring new social housing. This has little or nothing to do with middle-to-high earners being priced out of specific neighbourhoods by demand from other middle-to-high earners.

The other, which rarely gets mentioned, is the fact that councils that are responsible for getting large numbers of homeless families into new long-term accommodation have suffered significant cutbacks that mean they are less capable of dealing with complex cases and high workloads. (If you are really interested in any of this, I expanded on these points here.)

One consequence of this is that councils end up putting families into temporary accommodation — which can include hostels and even bed and breakfasts. This isn’t just sub-obtimal. It is also expensive.

Claire Miller from the data unit did an FOI to all councils asking about this, and in particular how many people were affected and how much it was costing. The result was a fairly shocking investigation which got great use in the Mirror and regional titles across the country. The average rise in costs, among all councils was nearly 50 per cent in less than a decade, with many councils seeing triple-figure percentage increases.

You can find links to a series of stories Claire wrote or part-wrote through this Twitter thread. Andy Gregory at the Mirror got some top-level reaction, too, with shadow housing minister John Healey saying the data showed “taxpayers [were] paying the price for the government’s failure on homelessness”.

2 The gender pay gap is a thing

“Aha,” you cry. “No it isn’t! There’s no evidence men and women get paid different amounts for different jobs! I read that somewhere on the internet.”

For one thing, that’s far from clear. Properly controlled evidence is actually quite hard to gather and the results of published surveys and studies are not uniform. (This study, for example, showed a gender gap remained even for people on the same grade in the same job.)

But surely the bigger point is this: the gender pay gap isn’t just a matter of women getting paid less for the same job. It’s also a matter of not having access to the same jobs in the first place. Not being promoted to senior positions, for example, or being penalised in the workplace for having children.

So when the data makes clear there is a significant and persistent pay gap between men and women considered as a whole, it is something I don’t think we can (or should want to) breezily dismiss.

To mark International Women’s Day, Claire worked with Carlos Novoa to make this interactive which showed — on average, for your area — how much more (or less) you would earn if you were a man (or woman).

You can try it on a number of Trinity Mirror website, for example here.

3. Youth unemployment

One of Trinity Mirror’s flagship titles — the Liverpool Echo — is running a campaign to get young people into work. As part of this, we did some research into the scale of worklessness among teenagers in the region. You can read the findings — which did not make happy reading — here.

4. Are “pushy parents” behind a huge rise in children turning up at A&E?

“Pushy” might sound unfair. And in some cases it’s probably much more a case of “worried about my child and not willing to wait for a GP appointment” (even though most GPs I know will always fit children in, on the day, if there is any cause for concern).

Either way, many hospitals around the country are reporting really significant increases in the number of children in casualty departments. In Cornwall, for example, numbers are up a quarter on four years ago.

Dr Stephanie Smith, of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, told Claire there was an increasing problem of “parents who expect immediate cures”.

She added: “If they’re told it’s a three day cough, they want it cured straight away.

“They want a different solution and they’re willing to shop around. We see parents who say, ‘I’m not going home until you make them better’.”

5. Other stories we broke this week

Rob Grant did some really interesting data analysis showing that if you are poor you are less likely to recover from mental illness; Deb Aru looked at how class sizes have risen in the last two years across the country; and I decided to look into how adoption rates for children in care have fallen sharply in the last two years, and why (most experts seem to link it to two 2013 court cases which decided adoption should be a solution of last resort).

Have an excellent weekend.