Tag Archives: UK

Why Do We Waste So Much Food in the UK?

Why does the average person waste so much food?

See previous post on this topic – Stats on Food Waste in the UK

According to the WRAP (2012) survey two reasons account for 80% of food wasted in the home –

  • Just under half of avoidable food and drink waste (worth £5.6 billion) was classified as ‘not used in time’: thrown away because it had either gone off or passed the date on the packaging. This included large amounts of bread, milk and fresh potatoes.
  • A further 31% (worth £4.1 billion) was classified as ‘cooked, prepared or served too much’: this included food and drink that had been left over after preparation or serving, such as carbonated soft drinks, home-made and pre-prepared meals, and cooked potatoes.
  • The remaining reasons are linked to personal preferences including health reasons and not liking certain foods (£1.9 billion), and accidents, including ‘food dropped on the floor’ and ‘failure of a freezer’ (£560 million).

Of course what the survey fails to look at is what food waste reveals about our culture. Here I’d suggest the following ‘deeper-level’ reasons for there being so much food waste…

  1. ‘Food materialism and choice culture’ – I’m sure many people overbuy during a weekly shop simply because of the attraction of a full-trolley and a well stocked fridge. Then there’s the fear of running out choice – Technically if you shop once a week, say on a Saturday, you would end up with a limited choice of meal on a Friday. We do live in a materialist culture which offers us lots of never ending choices, surely the number one reason for the over-purchasing of food is simply the unconscious replication of a (moneyless) supermarket in your kitchen?

  2. Throw away culture – straight from my current favourite Sociologist – Z. Bauman – argues that the way we distinguish ourselves today is the rapidity with which we can use things up and then discard them – While I don’t think this quite appeals to our approach to food (I’m sure it’s generally regarded as shameful to throw away food), the fact that we are used to generating waste as part of our consumerist norms is hardly going to do anything to put us off throwing away food.

  3. What I call the ‘Masterchef effect’ – Buying particular items to make a particular recipe, not quite using all of the items bought and lacking the ingenuity to innovate around left-overs, resulting in bits of food getting thrown away. The more complex the recipe, the more obscure ingredients to throw away next week.

  4. Occasional ‘top up buying’ in order to satisfy whimsical desires for a particular meal – which means what you’ve already got in the fridge goes off. We do live in a culture of instant-gratification after all, so if I want stir fry tonight and pizza tomorrow and this means throwing away yesterday’s pasta the day after tomorrow, then wtf not?!

  5. Hurried Lives – meaning we either don’t have the time or the energy to cook so we have beans on toast instead, meaning the fresh veg goes off. On the occasion I do waste food, this is my number one reason…

  6. It’s not exactly a causal factor, just a perpetuating one: it’s hardly in the government’s interest to clamp down on food waste. The agri-food sector contributed £97.1 billion or 7.4% to national Gross Value Added in 2012. We may well throw £12 billion of this in the bin every year, but I’m sure it doesn’t cost that much to take it to land fill. If we didn’t throw away this food, then demand would fall and we’d lose 1% of our GVA. That’s a massive chunk of cash. Actually it’s more than the entire International Aid Budget.

What’s above are just a few Sociological meanderings on the matter of Food Waste, comments welcome…

Food Waste in the UK

Food Waste in the United Kingdom

The average person will spend £16 000 over the course of their lifetime on food which they will then throw away. That’s getting on for one year’s worth of wages on the median salary once taxes are taken into account.

In 2012, 15% of edible food and drink purchases were wasted at an estimated cost of £480 per year for an average household. This figure includes domestic shopping and meals out. If you divide this by 2.4 (the average number of people in a household) and multiply by 81.5 (average Life Expectancy) then this means the average person will spend just under £16 000 over the course of their lifetime on food which will be wasted.

Of food brought into the household (excluding waste generated by supermarkets and restaurants etc), £12.5 billion was wasted in 2012.

Avoidable food waste UK

By cost, the largest food groups wasted were:

  • Meat and fish (17%; £2.1 billion).
  • Home-made and pre-prepared meals (17%; £2.1 billion).
  • Fresh vegetables and salad (14%; £1.7 billion).
  • Drink (10%; £1.3 billion).
  • Fresh fruit (7%; £900 million).

Cost of Food Waste UK

On a day to day basis this means in the UK we throw away…

  • 1.4 million bananas
  • 1.5 million tomatoes
  • 1.2 million yogurts
  • 24 million slices of bread

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the economic inefficiency of our food strategies. Some of the food we eat is effectively wasted because it simply goes towards making us overwight (37% of UK adults) or obese (25% of the UK adults). This then means we spend additional resources on diet regimes and gym memberships in order to lose said weight, or we pay more collectively through the NHS to deal with higher rates of weight-related illnesses.

Finally, one could say that the way we source our food is also inefficient – We only grow 53% of our food supply within the UK (I say only, I actually thought it was nearer to 40%) which means we also bear the cost of international food miles where imports are concerned. (Although in fairness, much of this comes from Europe, parts of which are not much further away than parts of the UK are from each other.)

Related Posts –

Why does the average person waste so much food?

Sources Used

DEFRA – Food Statistics Pocketbook 2013

WRAP – Household food and drink waste in the United Kingdom

Changing Patterns of Drug Use in the UK

Just a quick summary of changing patterns of drug use in the UK from the UK Government’s latest drug misuse survey.. I was going to do some analysis, but the pictures look so nice I’ll just leave it as it is for now….

The headline figure has to be the long term (20 year) decline in use of all drugs except for Cocaine for 16-24 year olds, while the overall trend in drug use for 16-59 year olds has remained stable at about 3% of the population.

Key Stat One – There has been an overall decline in drug use since the mid 1990s

  • Around 1 in 11 (8.8%) adults aged 16 to 59 had taken an illicit drug in the last year. However, this proportion more than doubles for 6 to 24 year olds (18.9%).
  • Around one-third of adults had taken drugs at some point during their lifetime. Of 16 to 59 year olds, 35.6% had reported ever using drugs.
  • There has been a long term decrease in drug use since 1996. During this period any Drug use within the last year for 16-59 year olds has decreased from about 11 to 9% of the population
  • There has been a marked decrease in drug use since 1996  amongst younger people. Any drug use within the last year for 16-24 year olds has decreased from about 30% of the population to 20% of the population.
  • Use of any class A drug within the last year for 16-59 year olds has remained stable at around 3% of the population.

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Key Stat Two The only significant counter trend to the above is the increasing use of Cocaine, although this peaked in 2008 and has been in general decline since…

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Key Stat ThreeA significant proportion of drug users are frequent users

  • 50% of Cannabis users and 20% of Cocaine users can be classified as frequent drug users.
  • 3.1% of adults aged 16 to 59 can be defined as frequent drug users (having taken any illicit drug more than once a month on average in the last year).
  • The proportion of young adults aged 16 to 24 classed as frequent drug users was 6.6% in 2013/14 and represented a statistically significant increase compared with 2012/13 (5.1%).

3

Key Stat FOURMen are more than twice as likely to take drugs compared to women

4

Key Stat FIVE – Unsurprisingly pub and club goers are much more likely to take drugs…

  • Those who went to nightclubs or pubs more often were more likely to use drugs frequently.
  • Levels of use of any illicit drug more than once a month on average in the last year were higher among those who went to nightclubs four or more times in the last month (10.9%) compared with 2.3% of respondents who had not visited a nightclub in the past month.
  • A similar pattern was found among those visiting pubs more often.

5

 

Key Stat SIXDrug use is highest amongst those from mixed ethnic backgrounds

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Key Stat SEVEN – Gay people are about three times more likely to take Cannabis or Cocaine compared to straight people

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Key Stat Eight – Poor people are twice as likely to take drugs as rich people

No nice graphic for this but…

  • People living in deprived areas were more likely to be frequent drug users.
  • A larger proportion (4.5%) of respondents who lived in more deprived areas were frequent drug users compared with those who lived in the least deprived areas (2.3%).

Sources

Drug Misuse Survey https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335989/drug_misuse_201314.pdf

The Guardian – Useful summary of some of the data in the above survey…

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jul/25/britons-illegal-drugs-who-they

 

Increasing income inequality in the UK

I thought this infographic showing income inequality was worth sharing (From the Equality Trust) –

income-inequality-uk-2

Unfortunately (if you think income inequality is bad!) things have got even worse since 2012!

Britain’s top executives are now paid around 130 times their average employee, according to analysis released today by the High Pay Centre think-tank. 

Income inequality has got a LOT WORSE in recent decades. In 1998, the average FTSE 100 CEO was paid 47 times their average employee, which means that while average incomes have stagnated in relation to the cost of living, the incomes of the very richest have almost trebled in 15 years.

The video below illustrates this in stark terms by comparing the typical wage of a nurse with that of a typical CEO, the headline figures being as follows:

  • A CEO earns as much in 3 days as a nurse does in a year.

  • A CEO earns more in a year than a nurse will earn in her entire life.

  • If we redistributed the income of the top 1%, then on average each household in the UK would be better off by £3K a year.

 Related questions you might like to think about include….

1. Why does such income inequality exist?

2. Is this fair? (are CEOs worth 130 times more than their average employee?)

3. Is income inequality good or bad for society?

4. If you’ve answered ‘no’, and ‘bad’ to questions 2 and 3, can anything be done about increasing income inequality?

Work in Low Pay, No Pay Britain

In this latest Thinking Allowed podcast on ‘Low pay, no pay’ Britain Laurie Taylor talks to the sociologist, Tracy Shildrick, about her prize winning study of individuals and families who are living in or near poverty. The research was conducted in Teesside, North East England, and focuses on the men and women who’ve fallen out of old working class communities and must now cope with drastically reduced opportunities for standard employment. To my mind, this is a good in-dept illustration of what life is really like for a section of the Precariat (although Shildrick would be more cautious).

article-2303333-190F447B000005DC-765_964x621

The research is based on the book (published in 2012) – Poverty and insecurity Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain by Tracy Shildrick

This book explores how men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced and where people exist without predictability or security in their lives, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.

Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment.

Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a ‘hard-to-reach group’ of younger and older people, men and women this research challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain.

Below is a summary of the main points of the podcast

  • The low-pay no-pay cycle is much more common than long-term unemployment. Most people intreviewed were committed to work, even though the jobs they did were not ‘comfortable’ jobs. This was one of their most consistent findings…. which in part explains why these people go back time and time again. This of course is the opposite to what we here in the media about people ‘languishing on benefits’.
  • It is not a guarantee that taking up employment will mean an individual is going to better off than on benefits. Most people were ashamed at having to claim benefits.
  • Jobs typically did not last long enough to take workers away from poverty.
  • In work-poverty is – 66% of poverty live in households were at least one person is in-work.
  • The types of work include factory jobs, bars, customer service, often run through agencies.
  • For the people interviewed these type of jobs are not stepping stones to something better – they get one foot on the rung of the ladder, get knocked off, and have to climb back on again.
  • Shildrick is not convinced that the term ‘Precariat’ is accurate enough to describe adequately the experience of all people who are sometimes put into this category. She argues that the experiences of the people she interviewed are different to those of a graduate working for a few years in similar jobs (although the people she interviewed do seem to fit into the definition of the Precariat used by the GBCS below)
  • In response to the idea that better training is the solution to helping people in these jobs, Shildrick suggests we need to look at the bigger picture – society needs these jobs – we need to think ahout how to reward them more appropriately.

Shildrick suggests that it is ultimately employers who have the power to help people out of this cycle. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be of employers being increasingly inflexible while demanding that employees be more flexible.

Links –

1. This seems to be a good in-dept illustration of what life is really like for a section of the Precariat

2. Also a nice illustration of the effects of living in liquid-modernity – The reality is actually bleaker for them than the above research might suggest – As Zygmunt Bauman reminds us (in Liquid Modernity)- ‘The bottom category are the easeist to replace, and  now they are disposabe and so that there is no point in entering into long term commitments with their work colleagues…..  this is a natural response to a flexibilised labour market. This leads to a decline in moral, as those who are left after one round of downsizing wait for the next blow of the axe.

Winner of the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2013 How do men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced? Are we witnessing the growth of a new class, the ‘Precariat’, where people exist without predictability or security in their lives? What effects do flexible and insecure forms of work have on material and psychological well-being? This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a ‘hard-to-reach group’ of younger and older people, men and women, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many. – See more at: http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847429100#sthash.8EnqVw5J.dpuf
Winner of the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2013 How do men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced? Are we witnessing the growth of a new class, the ‘Precariat’, where people exist without predictability or security in their lives? What effects do flexible and insecure forms of work have on material and psychological well-being? This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a ‘hard-to-reach group’ of younger and older people, men and women, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many. – See more at: http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847429100#sthash.8EnqVw5J.dpuf
Winner of the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2013 How do men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced? Are we witnessing the growth of a new class, the ‘Precariat’, where people exist without predictability or security in their lives? What effects do flexible and insecure forms of work have on material and psychological well-being? This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a ‘hard-to-reach group’ of younger and older people, men and women, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many. – See more at: http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847429100#sthash.8EnqVw5J.dpuf

Inequality updates – UK Focus

While the recent recession and ‘recovery’ have meant economic hardship and uncertainty for the majority, the VERY rich have got relatively richer.

Before looking at things sociologically (looking at the bigger picture) I’d just llike to say THANKS AGAIN TO THE BBC* for another excellent example of narrow-reporting which fosters false consciousness – This item reminds us that the levels of income inequality have fallen – if we compare the top fifth with the bottom fith of households over the last year.

HOWEVER…. If we look at how the incomes of the top one percent and top ten percent compare to other slices of the population further down the social-class spectrum, a picture of INCREASING INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UK EMERGES

This article from The Guardian summarises the situation –

The super-rich – the top 1% of earners – now pocket 10p in every pound of income paid in Britain, while the poorest half of the population take home only 18p of every pound between them, according to a report published this week by the Resolution Foundation thinktank, which reveals the widening gap between those at the very top and the rest of society.

Inequality has grown sharply over the past 15 years, according to Resolution’s analysis: the top 1% of earners have seen their slice of the pie increase from 7% in the mid-1990s to 10% today, while the bottom half have seen their share drop from 19% to 18%.

This post from the Guerilla Policy Network offers a nice summary of the lates UN Human Development Report which highlights the following facts –

  • The UK’s poorest 40% share in just 14.6% of the national wealth – the only country performing worse was Russia (96)
  • The richest 20% have incomes more than ten times as high as the bottom 20%, this is the same as Nigeria, and worse than Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and twice as bad as Sri Lanka and Ethiopia (96)
  • As inequality in the UK has risen, intergenerational mobility (children ‘doing better’ than their parents) has also declined (2013 p36)
  • The majority of working people have had little or no wage increases in recent decades, while the top earners have seen substantial increases (2013 p22)

For those of you who prefer Infographics to illustrate inequality, here is one from the equality trust (love their work – ‘gis a job!)

income-inequality-uk-2

*(Seriously, thankyou, without you, BBC, teaching concepts such as ideological control, agenda setting, and false consciousness is just so easy.)

Ten Indicators of Gender Inequality in the UK 2012

OK So accuse me of selection bias… but here are 10 indicators of inequality in the UK by gender… Mainly focusing on work, politics and the media 

Looking at ‘positions of privilege’ women account for…

  1. 26% of News Journalists (2011) (3% of sports journalists!)
  2. 22% of Members of Parliament. Although admittedly numbers have more than doubled in the last 20 years.
  3. 23% of judges
  4. 16% of members of the cabinet
  5. 4.9% of directors of the FTSE 250 companies

Looking at ‘indicators of disadvantage’…

  1. 65% of the Tory Cuts to the public sector will be born by women
  2. 70% of people on the minimum wage are women
  3. 75% part-time workers are women
  4. 90% of Single Parents are women
  5. On top of all this, women earn only 85% of men (more usually expressed as a  gender pay gap of 14.9%)

Find out More

Also look out for an infographic I intend to to knock up on this topic (exciting I know!) 

 

Whither my vain search for nice graphs on UK wealth statistics

… Hopefully in a response that’ll land me with a link to some nice.. err.. wealth distrbution graphs or pie charts…

I’ve spent the last 5 years or so looking for some nice up to date visual resources on wealth distribution in modern Britain, to update the pie chars I’ve gto from about 2006 – with really limited success – is it just me or is it just impossible to find easily accessible information on wealth stats in the UK… Or are pie charts on wealth distribution just not 2012? (or 2007-11 for that matter?)

You might think that searching around the government’s own Office for National Statistics, you’d get some info about wealth, but no, this gets  you nowhere – not if you want any data from the last few years at least.

Out of desperation you might try typing in any combination of ‘wealth distribution 2010 or 11 and UK or Britain’ to google but, with the exception of the excellent report mentioned below from 2010,  you simply get directed to old stats or stats on income distribution – so this is hopeless.  

So  unless I’m missing something – it’s actually very difficult to get reliable, up to date info on Wealth Stats – but here’s five, well four, sources of info.. no nice pie charts tho’!

Firstly there is this recent government report The most comprehensive recent source on wealth distribution seems to be this report from 2010 ‘An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK’ (summarised in this Guardian Article) which found that by retirement age the top 10%, led by higher professionals, had amassed wealth of £853 000,  while the bottom 10% of households, led by routine manual workers, had amassed less than £8,000. This means – and this is my headline figure – the richest 10% are 100 times richer than the bottom 10%

For an even starker comparison – the top 1% had, by the time they reached retirement age,  accrued an average wealth of £2.6 million, making them more than 300 times richer than the bottom 10%

The report measured wealth inequalities by looking at total assets accrued over the course of a lifetime – the findings were hardly surprising – the older you are the richer you are, the poorer your parents were, the less likely you were to accrue wealth and so on…. but it is informative to have such data to hand.

The body responsible for the above report is worth keeping an eye on – The Centre for Analaysis of Social Exclusion for updates on wealth issues.

Secondly, the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics (summarised in a blog which I’m not going to link to because it doesn’t link to anyone else) – reports that

The richest fifth have nearly two thirds of the wealth. More startling is that the poorer half of us speak for just 9p in every £1 of privately held wealth.
Private household net wealth in Great Britain totalled £9 trillion in 2006/08 and nearly 80% of this is accumulated in property and private pension entitlements. 

Median household net wealth was £204,500 in 2006/08. The least wealthy half of households accounted for only 9 per cent of wealth, while the wealthiest 20 per cent of households had 62 per cent of total wealth.

The least wealthy 10 per cent of households had negative total net wealth
Median net wealth – including pensions, houses and cars, but excluding mortgages and other debt – of a household in the South East is £287,900. In Scotland, it is £150,600.

Thirdly, you could use the recent Barclay’s wealth report I blogged about two blogs back

Fourthly, everyone of course knows about the rich list – I’m now reliant on other people’s summaries of this because of the Time’s paywall, and in any case, its international so the this list isn’t UK focussed and it doesn’t talk of ‘distribution’ focussing merely on the worst excesses.

Finally, For income inequalities – we can rely on the JRF’s yearly report on Poverty and Inequality – but this is based on income measurements rather than wealth.

You might like to think about why it’s so hard to find info on this stuff… Or if you know more about where to get this data from than I do, let me know!

Increasing income inequality in Britain

The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently published its latest report on poverty and inequality in Britain – below are some of the key findings

This data is derived from the Family Resources Survey, a survey of around 26,000 households in the United Kingdom

Income distribution

distribution household income copy

The above table shows the UK income distribution in 2009–10. The graph shows the number of people living in households with different income levels, grouped into £10 income bands. The height of the bars represents the number of people in each income band. The figures are after tax and benefits and before any costs such as housing are taken into account.

  • Median equivalised income (equivalised to a couple with no children) stood at £413 a week. This basically means that 50% of people live in households below $413 a week, and 50% above this point.
  • It is also noteworthy that more than 1.4 million individuals, out of a private household population of approximately 60 million individuals, have equivalised household incomes above £1,500 a week.

Of course, what you don’t get from the above table is a measurement of ‘quality of life’ – for the poorest, their cost of living is going to be higher – as they can’t afford cars to get to supermarkets to buy cheaper food for example and poorly insulated houses cost more to heat. Also, for the very rich, they probably own their houses out right and so they have no housing costs. Finally, some of that income going to richest 1.4 million people will be in the form of rent being paid by the bottom third or so of individuals who cannot afford mortgages – you know, like young students at university. That will be some of you in two years time – paying your rent to your rich landlord- doing your bit to make sure that that that bar at the right hand side of the graph remains standing tall.

Finally, also note that this tells you little about how people feel about being poor or being rich – for info on these check out these two blogs (links to be added later)

Changes in income distribution

income changes

The above table basically shows you that, for the masses in the middle, some income has been redistributed to the poorer. However, if you look at the extremes, note that both the number of extremely poor people and extremely rich people have both increase – hence Britain has become a more unequal country over the last decade – this is most graphically illustrated by the Gini Coefficient

Gini

The Gini coefficient reduces the entire income distribution into a single number between 0 and 1: the higher the number, the greater the degree of income inequality. A value of 0 corresponds to the absence of inequality, so that, having adjusted for household size and composition, all individuals have the same household income. In contrast, a value of 1 corresponds to inequality in its most extreme form, with a single individual having all the income in the economy.

One of the things that prevented this spiralling out of control under new labour were the benefits system they had in place that redistributed income away from the relatively rich (not the very rich) to the poorest.

Watch out for income inequality increasing even further under the conservatives!