This is where I discuss the way we live in the UK and the many ways in which that is constantly changing
12:18 UK time, Wednesday, 30 November 2011
I was having lunch with a couple of respected figures in the criminal justice world yesterday when the subject of drugs reform came up.
"It is a bit like slavery," one of my lunch-partners said. "The arguments for reform were won decades before it actually happened. What will it take actually to make change happen on drugs?"
10:30 UK time, Monday, 28 November 2011
Here's my report about the annual net migration to the UK in 2010 was 252,000 - the highest calendar year figure on record, figures show.
The data from the Office for National Statistics showed immigration remained steady at 591,000, but there was a drop in the number of people leaving the UK.
13:37 UK time, Thursday, 24 November 2011
"One or two people are not overly happy…"
I have just taken a call from an official at the Department of Communities (DCLG) following my post on the housing stats yesterday and my appearance this morning on the Today programme.
12:19 UK time, Wednesday, 23 November 2011
On Monday, the prime minister donned builders' boots to promote his government's "unashamedly ambitious" strategy for providing England with hundreds of thousands of affordable homes. On Tuesday, his government quietly published statistics on how many affordable homes were actually started in the six months since April.
The figure was 454.
11:37 UK time, Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Here's my report on government plans to get "Britain building again". The mortgage indemnity scheme, in which the government will underwrite part of the risk to lenders, could help up to 100,000 people in England. I ask housing minister Grant Shapps for some details.
10:57 UK time, Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Here's my report following the first Big Society projects getting under way and the prime minister meeting the first 500 of its community organisers.
11:43 UK time, Thursday, 17 November 2011
Former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller today joins an increasingly long list of "formers" and "exes" who have publicly condemned the so-called "War on Drugs" as a "dead end".
This afternoon in the House of Lords there will be a former President (Switzerland's Ruth Dreifuss), a former chief of the US Federal Reserve (Paul Volker) and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer (Nigel Lawson).
12:23 UK time, Wednesday, 16 November 2011
I don't know how bruised Immigration Minister Damian Green is this morning after his ticking off by the statistics watchdog.
But the more I think about the row over his use of drug seizure figures, the more I conclude that the real scandal is the simplistic nature of the debate.
17:38 UK time, Monday, 7 November 2011
I have had exclusive access to the first few months of the government's flagship Work Programme.
The government's hope is that the scheme will get a million people off welfare and into jobs in two years - in the teeth of the downturn and without costing the taxpayer a penny.
17:40 UK time, Thursday, 3 November 2011
In the last few days I have been sent two pieces of research which, in different ways, try to answer the same question: Why do people obey the law?
Normally, we ask the question round the other way, trying to understand what it is that causes people to break the law. But it is just as interesting and potentially informative to invert the proposition and consider the reasons citizens have for staying on the straight and narrow.
11:18 UK time, Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Here's my interview with Prince Charles who has said that he is determined to help some of the most deprived parts of the country during the economic downturn.
During a visit to Burnley in Lancashire, he said he will work to boost regeneration in some of England's poorest towns.
10:20 UK time, Monday, 17 October 2011
Ministers like statistics which show the other lot in a bad light and themselves basking in glory.
But often the numbers have an irritating habit of not adding up that way.
13:58 UK time, Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Is anyone surprised by today's Institute for Fiscal Studies report forecasting that, as Britain gets poorer, more people will be poor?
At first sight it seems self-evident that falling incomes, rising prices and a squeeze on welfare will mean larger numbers find themselves below the breadline.
10:30 UK time, Monday, 10 October 2011
"There is just incredible incivility in this country… people are rude to each other… public discourse is so bad mannered… we have come to assume and resign ourselves to the fact that civility is on a permanent and inevitable downward slide."
So said David Cameron in 2007, echoing a widespread public view that Britain's behaviour was indicative of a country careering headlong for hell in a handcart.
07:30 UK time, Thursday, 6 October 2011
Looking at some new figures on ethnic minorities in Britain the other day, I glanced at a footnote and suddenly sat bolt upright in my chair.
The implications of it were clear: Britain's mixed-race community must be at least double the size we previously thought.
14:48 UK time, Tuesday, 4 October 2011
For a politician who wants Britain to abandon its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, Theresa May devoted a surprising chunk of her conference speech today to quoting directly from it.
Her particular concern is that "misinterpretation of Article 8 of the ECHR - the right to a family life" has prevented the government deporting people who shouldn't be here. She undoubtedly touches a public nerve when she lists examples of foreign undesirables avoiding the plane back home because of the Human Rights Act.
15:55 UK time, Thursday, 22 September 2011
The life experience of British people born between the years 1925 and 1934 has long had demographers and insurance companies scratching their heads.
For reasons which remain unclear, individuals within this slice of the UK population have been living longer and healthier lives than groups both older and younger.
10:46 UK time, Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Here's my report from Dale Farm, the largest illegal travellers' site in the UK, which has won a last minute legal reprieve against the eviction of its residents.
22:25 UK time, Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Why are British children so unhappy? Four years after Unicef sparked national soul-searching with analysis showing child well-being in the UK at the bottom of a league of developed nations, the organisation has attempted to explain our problem.
The answer, it seems, is that we put too little store on family time and too much on material goods. Unicef paints a picture of a country that has got its priorities wrong - trading quality time with our children for "cupboards full of expensive toys that aren't used".
18:52 UK time, Monday, 12 September 2011
What does the phrase "community sentence" mean to you?
Journalists sometimes characterise a court's use of such a measure as the offender "escaping prison" - the suggestion being that only depriving the criminal of his or her liberty amounts to a suitably rigorous punishment.
Mark joined his local paper after leaving school, inspired to become a journalist by playing Waddington’s ‘Scoop’ aged 13.
He has won numerous awards for his reporting. Most recently, his writing won a Royal Statistical Society award for excellence and was a finalist in the online journalism awards in San Francisco.
His ambition is to try to chronicle the story of changing Britain and for Arsenal to win some silverware.
Before being appointed BBC News home editor in 2004, Mark was home and social affairs editor at Channel Four News and political editor at Five News.
He is married with four children.
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