The whole story is pretty odd and would raise some important questions if it were presented to a financial intermediary, so it’d be good to know what questions were asked before it was raised in Parliament

3) If she’s not a beneficiary, did the survivor give you any guidance on why the deceased decided to pass down the assets via a single cheque rather than via a bank transfer or by changing the will?

2) If she’s not, surely the other beneficiaries could fix this situation? They should be well placed to judge whether the deceased had intended to gift a substantial chunk of his assets to her

The other segments at least rely on model-based claims that are more arguable - but still contestable - but to have the central claim of an entire wing of the model trivially rebutted by data from an organisation Portes is linked with is unworthy of a schoolboy

The real cherry on the cake is that there was in fact a protest in Liverpool Street Station involving flags at the weekend…

x.com/talofer/stat...

… but you’ll never guess which flags were on show

What really gets me is the mad clashing of class in the image of
- 20 fourteen year old skinheads
- ⁠a choral rendition of Rule Britannia

There’s been plenty of footage from protests from far right to hard left on social media over the summer - it’s just not hard to make up something believable

The first obvious tell that the story is made up is that the freelance writer involved hasn’t got any documentary evidence

I’m not a journalist and even I would wanna get a photo of the mad scene she paints here

They put it right and they changed the system to make it work better in the future. What more should they have done?

Worth keeping a sense of proportion here. Just over 500 people had their benefits temporarily paused pending an appeal and then reinstated; the system was changed so it won’t happen again; as a result the state will now save upwards of £30m a year due to reduced fraud

Seems very far from a tragedy!

So pilot programs can’t be run if they aren’t with certainty going to produce zero false positives?

So your view is that any system which has a less than 100% perfect detection rate is unacceptable? In that case, how do you fix any issues where you have given out too many benefits?

It’s great to identify issues and deliver enhancements to processes - particularly for relatively easy-to-fix issues like this, commentators need to move from a “this should never have happened” model to a model of “this should never happen *again*”

In the real world, a 97.5% success rate in a pilot program which resulted in enhancements to the appeals program to further reduce the error rate and the cost of appeals would be regarded as wildly successful

So California’s purchase price basis for property tax assessment crushes transactions, particularly in the very cyclical SF market, because someone living in the house has a benefit from avoided taxes which can’t be transferred to the new owner, making downsizing extremely negative value

Part of this is their choices on basis cause lots of issues, while cross state arbitrage illustrate other issues in a non-unitary system

What quasi-official position is this?

What is your prediction about what the March PAYE data on employment by nationality will show?

LFS to October showed has employment down 5% in various prime cohorts and down 10% in the 18-24 cohort from peak, so if the LFS is to be trusted I would be deriving very little comfort from flat YOY data

What would you estimate for net migration for 2024? GFC employment loss was around 2%, so at 400k we’d still be looking at very poor employment outcomes for UK workers