The Stats of the Nation: Sex, drugs and empty homes
Tim Harford explores the numbers that help explain fertility, pharmaceuticals, crime and housing in the UK.
What kind of state does the UK find itself in as we start 2026? That鈥檚 the question Tim Harford and the More or Less team is trying to answer in a series of five special programmes.
In the third episode, we鈥檙e searching for answers to these questions:
Are there really 700,000 empty homes that could be used to solve the housing crisis?
Does the NHS pay less for drugs than health services in other countries?
Is violent crime going up or down?
Is the UK in the midst of a fertility crisis?
Get in touch if you鈥檝e seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at: moreorless@bbc.co.uk
Contributors:
Dr Huseyin Naci, Associate Professor and Director the Pharmaceutical Policy Lab at the London School of Economics
Professor Jennifer Dowd, deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford
Credits:
Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporters: Lizzy McNeill and Nathan Gower
Producers: Katie Solleveld and Charlotte McDonald
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: Sarah Hockley and James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
On radio
Broadcast
- Wednesday 09:00麻豆社 Radio 4
Unlock the history and truth behind the data with The OU
Explore how numbers shape, and sometimes mislead us, with The Open University.
When can you trust statistics?
麻豆社 Ideas discovers three easy ways to help make sense of statistics.
Download this programme
Subscribe to the More or Less Podcast or download individual episodes.