A Poor Infographic on Brits in the EU

The other day, the infographic below was doing the rounds on Twitter. Note that the source of the data, not necessarily the way it's been presented, appears to be IPPR and that it is undated.

The total of 2.2 million presumably includes the 329k for Ireland which would make the EU about 1.87 million. This can be compared with IPPR’s 2006 figure of 1.5 million in the EU excluding Ireland, which I quoted in a post here in November 2011 about British second homes in Europe.

This is a poor piece of graphical presentation making the sort of naïve error which was criticised by Edward Tufte 30 years ago in his The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The font size used for the numbering has been scaled to the area (and shape to some extent) of each country, so the 1m in Spain is the same size as the 6k in Poland. Obviously in the real Europe there are about 170 times as many Brits in Spain as in Poland, something which the presenter should have tried to address. He (or she) didn't explain the country shading blue to grey either

British Second Homes in Europe

Every week, the Spectator’s Barometer column presents facts which illuminate the previous week’s news. On 5 November this item appeared:

A place in the sun
HM Revenue and Customs announced a 200-strong team of officials who will track down income from undeclared overseas properties. Where should they look?

                     Source: Savills

I thought this was interesting for reasons which will become apparent later. However, although the numbers of second homes were presented to the nearest thousand, it seemed unlikely that they would be the same in two pairs out of five countries. Was the answer to be found on the Savills website?

Savills Estate Agents has a much-respected research department, and the views of its Director of Residential Research, Yolande Barnes, are often reported in the press. Among the publications listed on their website, is a Market snapshot UK second homes overseas, 2009. This reported an online survey of 1200 UK overseas second home owners that Savills International Research had conducted with HomeAway.co.uk. The numbers supporting the Spectator’s table are on page 3, specifically an estimate that there are “almost 430,000 UK households in possession of overseas properties” and a percentage breakdown of their location referencing the Survey of English Housing.

However, in 2011, HomeAway.co.uk and Savills Research conducted a ‘survey [published as UK second homes abroad Spotlight Autumn 2011] of almost 1,700 UK holiday home owners from a cross-section of the market, who have invested overseas over the last decade and currently let their properties to tourists’. The relevant data on the Number of UK households that own overseas properties were provided in Figure 1, and the locations in Figure 3. It appears that there are now about 475,000 such properties, so, with the location data extracted from the column graphic, a replacement for the Spectator table can be provided:

which supports the conclusion on the cover of the survey: ‘Enduring appeal France has retained its popularity with buyers’. The numbers don’t look intrinsically unreliable, either. The Savills report also shows that the number of overseas second homes more than doubled between 200 and 2008, but that the purchase rate has fallen recently to much lower levels.

So, currently the total number of properties in Europe is not far off 370,000. The number of properties in those countries which are not (or not yet) members of the EU (Norway, Switzerland, Croatia, Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia) is likely to be small, with the possible exception of Turkey. A conservative estimate of UK residents’ ownership of EU properties might be about 350,000.

However, it should be noted that the Savills survey identified properties which are let to tourists. In fact its collaborator, HomeAway.co.uk, describes itself as ‘the UK's no.1 holiday rentals website with over 250,000 properties worldwide’. Not everyone who has a second home lets it commercially. Instead they may well keep it for their own use, and perhaps that of family and friends. While such people are not of much interest to the new HMRC team described by the Spectator, they certainly own properties. At a guess, and probably an underestimate, one could assume there are 150,000 of them, making 500,000 UK-owned properties in the EU as a whole.

Many of these properties are likely to be owned by couples, and since most people’s priority in early adult life is to establish themselves in a first home in the UK, second homes are likely to be acquired later on. Second home owners are also likely to be from the higher socio-economic levels, A to C1. At this point, some key electoral facts of life need to be considered, bearing in mind that the overall turnout at the 2010 election was 65%.

On this basis, one can safely conclude that the likelihood of second home owners turning out to vote is higher than average. So what would happen if there were a referendum on the UK leaving the EU? In the referendum on AV in May 2011, just over 20 million votes were cast with an overall turnout of 42.2%, higher than expected, but boosted by turnouts of over 50% in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Perhaps for an EU referendum the turnout would be as high as 65%, as in the 1975 referendum on remaining in the EEC, so about 30 million votes. It seems highly likely that the EU second home owners and their family members would vote, amounting, at two votes per property, to about 1 million.

Furthermore, every British citizen who has been registered to vote in the UK within the last 15 years but is now resident abroad is eligible to vote in UK Parliamentary (general) elections, European Parliamentary elections and referendums in the UK. According to C4News Factcheck in April 2010: ‘There are 748,010 Brits living in the EU, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s official statistics office’, and 133,678 of them were living in France. However, at the time of Sarkozy’s visit to the UK in 2008, the Independent reported that ‘There are 250,000 British people living in France, mostly middle-aged, retired and living in rural areas’. In 2006, IPPR, in a report, Brits Abroad, estimated that there were more than 5.5 million British nationals living overseas permanently, 1.5 million in the EU excluding Ireland. In 2010 they updated the first of these figures to 5.6 million, - as they want £15 for the full new report, we will have to make do with the older 1.5 million estimate.

So a high turnout of those with UK second homes in the EU, combined with a lesser turnout of British nationals in the EU, might be the source of as many as 2 million votes in 30 million, or say 7% of the votes cast.

No doubt there are turkeys who think there is something to be said for Christmas, and others who wouldn’t turn out to vote for its abolition. But these 2 million votes are unlikely to be cast in favour of leaving the EU. If nothing else, it could be to the financial disadvantage of these voters: for example: UK pensions are not uprated for pensioners outside the EU; EU countries cannot levy property taxes on non-resident citizens of other EU nations while exempting their own nationals. Additionally, spending time in a European country, and travelling there more often than most people (38% haven’t taken a foreign holiday in the last three years - data in a previous post) would probably lead to an outlook which would rather see the UK as part of Europe, rather than isolated.

It’s worth looking at a recent ICM opinion poll (21/23 October) on staying or leaving the EU. Overall, 40% would probably or definitely vote to stay in, 49% probably or definitely vote to leave, 10% didn’t know (DK).

Interestingly, the two groups with the highest propensity to turn out and vote, the over 65s and the ABs, have sharply divergent views on leaving the EU. The C1s and 35-64s, also groups who tend to vote more than the younger and lower levels, are substantially in favour of leaving. Both are large segments of the electorate as the pie charts show. It would be very interesting to know whether the expansion of overseas second home ownership in the 2000s extended to the C1 group or whether it was confined to the ABs. It would require about 5% of the electorate to change their opinion to produce a referendum in favour of staying in, say about 1.5 million voters, fewer than the EU first and second home contingent arrived at above.  (Presumably the 1003 people in the ICM survey were all resident in the UK).

Should there ever be a referendum (and assuming there is an EU which remains worth voting about) the ‘Stay’ campaigners would do well to convince the EU property owners of the need to play safe. Similarly, the ‘Leave’ campaign might want to consider how to provide reassurance that the status quo of property ownership in Europe won’t change for the worse.

IPPR’s Three Tribes

An old joke recycled: There are three kinds of people who believe that there are three kinds of people: those who do, those who don’t and those who don’t know.

In the Guardian in July Allegra Stratton reported that Graeme Cook, from the think-tank IPPR, is proposing that the electorate has changed and that it no longer helps to think of swing voters and core voters, and in terms of the upper, middle and working classes. Instead he offers ‘three new tribes, and they do not have life-long loyalties to political parties’:

Pioneers (41% of Britons) are global, networked, like innovation and believe in the importance of ethics.
Prospectors (28%) like success, ambition, seek the esteem of others and if they think a party can help them help themselves, they are on board.
Settlers (31%) see things in terms of right and wrong, are wary of change, seek security and have a strong sense of place – patriotism and national security motivate them to vote.  All the social classes split up in roughly the same proportions. Settlers were most numerous after 1945, but as people became steadily more affluent, "post-material attitudes" dominated and so now Pioneers are the largest group.

Cook points out that:

"The question is which politician can harness the Pioneer, the Prospector and the Settler in a convincing way." The trick for politicians is to match up the different interests of the three groups like on a fruit machine. It is a complicated manoeuvre but it's what Miliband has managed to do on phone hacking.
… After the Milly Dowler hacking revelations, a campaign suitable for Pioneers suddenly became appealing to Settlers too. Prospectors joined in as it became clear to them at some point that Miliband was "winning".

However:

Miliband's natural base is Pioneers. But the Lib Dems and Greens appeal to this group too.

and the Tories also know which buttons to press:

Cook reflects that: "When Gove talks about school discipline, he is talking to Settlers. When Cameron talks about increasing aid to 0.7%, he is talking to Pioneers. And when George Osborne is talking about the deficit and tax, he is talking to Prospectors."

I looked for more about Cook’s research on the IPPR website, but it seems to be a work in hand and should be reporting later in the year. It certainly seems to be a different approach from the legendary ‘C2 housewives over 30’. To test out his proposal, I thought it might be informative to look at some recent polling results on major issues.

The key findings from an Angus Reid poll about Europe in July were:

57% say EU membership has been negative for the UK; 32% believe it has been positive (11% not sure)
49% would vote to leave the EU in a referendum; 25% would vote to stay in (27% not sure or wouldn’t vote)
81% would vote against the UK adopting the euro; only 8% endorse this idea (11% not sure or wouldn’t vote) 

This seems to suggest that even the ‘global’ Pioneers are divided over Europe.

YouGov@Cambridge polled in June about attitudes to International Aid for PoliticsHome and found that 41% were very or somewhat favourable towards it, 38% very or somewhat unfavourable, 17% neither.  This would give a good alignment of pro-aid and Pioneers only if none of the latter were neutral on the subject.

In August, Survation surveyed attitudes to crime and punishment including the death penalty for the Mail on Sunday. Its re-introduction for certain crimes was supported by 53%, opposed by 34% and 13% didn’t know.

The measure seems to appeal beyond the Settlers.



The factor missing from the IPPR typology (at least as described in the Guardian) is that of age, though it is implicit in the suggestion that Settlers have been in decline since 1945 and Pioneers are on the rise. The three polling examples indicate how important it can be. YouGov@Cambridge conclude that ‘Older voters are far more likely to be opposed to the principle of international aid than young people’ as can be seen in their chart below:

The Angus Reid poll also shows an increasingly negative view of Europe in older age groups, and the Survation poll showed an increasingly tough attitude about the death penalty for groups over 40:

The Survation poll also showed that on certain issues, gender has a significant effect on attitude:

The educational experiences of different age groups reflect the continuing expansion of opportunity over recent decades. Among the over 55s, about half finished full-time education before the age of 16, whereas about a third of the under 35s had finished under 18. (Source: Populus poll June 2011)

A much higher proportion of the full-time education has been at a university (in name) in recent years (data from an earlier post):

Whether older people’s attitudes reflect biologically-driven changes in psychological outlook due to ageing, or past levels of formal education is something that will become clearer over the next few decades. Perhaps by the time people reach 60 it is the experience gained on courses in the 'University of Life’ which counts.  However, formal educational seems to be inversely related to propensity to vote, for example in terms of turnout at the 2010 General Election, cited by MORI. The gender difference seems to be slight except for females under 25 who seem to find politics even less interesting than their male contemporaries. 

Britain, thankfully, has become an increasingly less class-conscious society, in which the majority of people now regard themselves as ‘middle class’, however squeezed they may be feeling. It therefore seems worthwhile to seek out categorisations other than the old favourites of A, B, C1 etc. It will be interesting to see whether Graeme Cook develops his Pioneer, Prospector, Settler model to accommodate those two eternal aspects of the human condition - age and gender, particularly when the former seems to be a major factor in variations in shaping opinions and in propensity to vote across the electorate.

ADDENDUM 22 SEPTEMBER

Grame Cook has now published Still partying like it's 1995 on the IPPR website which fills out his views on the 'political sociology' of modern Britain in some depth.  He seems to have moved away from the three types above, and looks at age as a factor in determining political opinions, if not gender.

Pennies from Heaven at IPPR

The key issue in UK politics is how to deal with the deficit. Labour says that the cuts in government expenditure are too much and too soon. The Coalition never tires of accusing Labour of being in denial about the scale of the problem they left behind last May. Labour knows that by the time of the next general election it will have to be regarded as trustworthy on the economy if it is to return to government. Andrew Rawnsley makes this point in today's Observer.  One aspect of the required rehabilitation is to convince the electorate that the situation was not of Labour’s making, but stemmed from its need to respond to the global economic crisis.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) describes itself as the UK’s leading progressive think tank and has just produced a briefing, ‘Debts and Deficits: How much is Labour to blame?’, which it summarises thus:

The Coalition government has sought to blame its Labour predecessor for Britain’s current fiscal position. There have also been accusations that the deficit was, at least in part, due to excessive spending by the last Labour government even before the recession of 2008 and 2009.

This note looks at the numbers on debt, deficits and spending (relative to GDP) – over time in the UK and comparing the UK with other developed economies.

On the basis of these numbers, Labour’s ‘fiscal profligacy’ just ahead of the recession would seem to have been on a very limited scale, and charges that the Coalition is tackling ‘Labour’s debt’ and ‘Labour’s deficits’, or that Labour let spending run out of control before the recession, do not stack up.

However, reading the report does uncover the following in the Summary:

Labour’s mistakes ahead of the financial crisis were to underestimate the risk of a recession and not to realise how much reliance it was placing on revenues from sources associated with rampant lending.

And in the Conclusion:

[Labour] appears to have been blind to the reliance it was placing on revenues from sources associated with rampant lending, such the City and the housing market. ... greater awareness might have suggested more caution.

Well, I never realised that governments didn’t know where their money was coming from. But presumably any Chancellor could put ‘uk tax revenues’ into Google, select (if it were today) ‘uk tax revenues 2009’ and hit on the first suggestion, a very helpful breakdown of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) annual receipts from 2001-2 onwards.

This shows that between 2001-02 and 2007-08 stamp duty (mostly tax on property sales) doubled and corporation tax increased by over 40% – a combined uplift of about £B22 which has since vanished! But Labour was “blind” to this happening apparently, tax receipts arriving like Pennies from Heaven. Surely ippr does not expect us to believe that Chancellors are not briefed frequently on the state of the HMRC collection?