This is where I discuss the way we live in the UK and the many ways in which that is constantly changing
17:55 UK time, Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Mark added analysis to:
If David Cameron is serious about using official well-being data to decide government policy, today he got some pointers as to where his priorities might lie.
I was particularly struck by the correlations between ethnicity and well-being.
16:36 UK time, Tuesday, 28 February 2012
If David Cameron is serious about using official well-being data to decide government policy, today he got some pointers as to where his priorities might lie.
Improving Britain's general happiness may mean (among other things) focusing on policies around unemployment, the retirement age and racial equality.
16:32 UK time, Friday, 17 February 2012
In the week that UK unemployment rose again, it has emerged that up to 20,000 jobs are to be created inside prisons in England and Wales.
Prisoners would be paid below the minimum wage and some of their earnings would go to help victims of crime.
15:59 UK time, Wednesday, 15 February 2012
The point of police and crime commissioners, we are told, is to increase the democratic accountability of the 41 police forces in England and Wales outside London.
Ministers felt police authorities were not sufficiently responsive to the demands of an anxious citizenry. Chief constables needed someone with electoral clout to connect them to the people, to keep them honest.
16:49 UK time, Friday, 10 February 2012
We are such a cynical lot. When a Downing Street advisor points out that loneliness is probably more dangerous to our health in retirement than smoking, there are plenty who immediately assume that the advice is part of some dastardly statist plot to get pensioners out of their one-bed flats to sweat their final years away on a factory production line - see below for one example.
But might it be true? And if it is, should we take isolation as seriously as we do obesity or smoking in our health strategies?
16:14 UK time, Monday, 30 January 2012
The Home Secretary used her speech on policing this morning to boast about how her government was "making the police more visible and available to the public than ever before".
Theresa May noted that the proportion of officers in England and Wales working on the frontline is planned to increase from 68% in 2010 to 70% by March this year.
12:23 UK time, Monday, 30 January 2012
The Home Secretary's speech on the police on Monday was billed as a coherent ideological vision for the service in England and Wales.
As she rubber-stamped proposed changes which will take tens of millions out of officers' pay packets, Theresa May emphasised that, while "some police officers will be disappointed by this outcome", she was not forcing through reform just to save money.
15:25 UK time, Thursday, 26 January 2012
"Stop believing what the government tells you" - advice from one senior executive in a Conservative-controlled council in England on local government cuts.
"This is the most unfair and unjust settlement I have ever seen, and the sooner it is seen off the better," said another, also working for a Tory authority.
17:42 UK time, Wednesday, 25 January 2012
When employment minister Chris Grayling and immigration minister Damian Green gave the Daily Telegraph an exclusive last week on foreign nationals who claim benefits they brought together two of the most combustible ingredients in popular political debate: illegal immigrants and benefit cheats.
Their article revealed how a new and "complex research exercise" had identified some 371,000 foreign-born residents who receive some kind of welfare payment. The ministers wrote of how they'd "already identified some with serious question marks over both their right to benefits and their immigration status."
09:10 UK time, Monday, 23 January 2012
Here's my report on the latest crime figures for England and Wales which have been released.
Overall, the numbers are stable but there has been a big rise in robberies and street crime.
13:21 UK time, Tuesday, 17 January 2012
The genesis of today's battle over Disability Living Allowance can be traced back to California in 1962 and a young man left severely disabled by polio.
Ed Roberts had applied to the state's university at Berkeley where one of the deans famously said: "we've tried cripples before and it doesn't work".
13:58 UK time, Monday, 16 January 2012
As Scotland considers pulling the plug on the Union, if the UK is really threatened it is probably from resentful Englanders more than belligerent Scots.
Team GB is limbering up for a year of unprecedented activity. Brass bands and bunting, anthems and ermine - Britain will be garlanded in red, white and (this year at least) blue as the Olympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee coincide to celebrate our sovereignty in extravagant and ostentatious style.
10:10 UK time, Wednesday, 4 January 2012
I was working for the BBC's Newsnight in 1993 and I sent this report from Eltham - just two weeks after the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
It is an interesting reminder of what life was like in the borough two decades ago and how far we've come.
15:47 UK time, Tuesday, 3 January 2012
The name Stephen Lawrence has come to define a watershed in British cultural life.
His death was not the first nor the last murder of a young black man blamed on racist killers in south London in the early 1990s.
00:42 UK time, Monday, 26 December 2011
As Britain stumbles into Boxing Day, trying to focus and avoid the festive wreckage, what better way to clear fogged heads than with my annual family puzzler?
As regular readers will know, the quiz is unusual in that no-one is expected to know the answers. All the solutions are numbers and the idea is simply to see who gets closest. This gives all participants a chance to win, irrespective of age or festive state of repair.
11:35 UK time, Tuesday, 20 December 2011
My report from outside St Paul's Cathedral asks whether the public shares the protestors' concerns about capitalism.
High Court proceedings have now begun to remove the tents from outside the cathedral.
15:55 UK time, Monday, 5 December 2011
As Parliament, police and press have attempted to explain the cause of England's August riots in a series of reports over the last week, one surprising word has bubbled up to the surface.
No, it is not "criminality" or "underclass" or "greed". It is "courtesy" - or a lack of it from the police.
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.
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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