Danny Dorling Seven Children Q&A: the data #Short

Q: Where did the data behind this book come from - and why was it written?

Author and University of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling talks about his new book Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation (Hurst), published 26 September.

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A: “The main data I use – there's lots and lots of other data – but the main data I use is the March releases of the Households Below Average Income report. Now, every March, on a particular day, the Secretary of State stands up and says something banal in Parliament, and somebody presses a button, and 29 or 30 spreadsheets are released to the public, although hardly anybody looks at them.

“So, there's this flood of information, but when they reveal things that are the most shocking since 1994 you have hardly any coverage of it at all. It's almost a way of covering up a story by flooding factual information about it, so it has to be turned back into human stories of young lives where you realise you don't get to be age three again or four again or five again or six again.

“And that was the driving force of doing this, to try to find a way to talk about something that we are dulled from listening about despite the fact we know so much about it. We must have more figures on the situation of children, child poverty, average children, slightly more affluent children. We have more statistics, I'm absolutely sure, in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, possibly anywhere in the world, and we may care the least of anywhere in Europe about the situation of children.”

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