Grant Shapps proactively investigates
issues of national concern and frequently publishes the
research in the form of papers and reports. You can find a selection
of his work below and where appropriate you can download a copy of
each report.
The major reports shown
below are available for instant download in
PDF format.
See how the report's release was covered on BBC1 Breakfast
News
here
Pay-Day for Loan Sharks How the poorest in society are paying up to 10,000%
APR as the Bank of England slashes its lending
rate towards zero.
9th January 2009
The Bank of
England has reduced interest rates to 1.5% - their
lowest levels since its establishment in 1694.
Meanwhile,
loans within the Home Credit Market have APRs ranging
from 100% to a staggering 10,000%.
A typical
loan in the Home Credit Market might see someone
borrowing £200, but paying back £300 just a couple of
months later - at a whopping 1576.6% APR.
Almost 90%
of the Home Credit Market is dominated by just six
companies.
The lack of
competition within the Home Credit Market has created
the right environment for extortionate APRs.
Here's how this
report was covered on BBC1 Business Breakfast News
CONSERVATIVE BLUEPRINT
FOR TACKLING HOMELESSNESS The Conservative Party is committed to tackling
homelessness in our society. We understand that in order to
properly address this issue we must go beyond dealing with
it purely as a problem of housing and instead accept the
multi-faceted nature of homelessness.
24th December 2008
The ideas and policies in this Statement have been worked on
by colleagues from across Shadow Departments and meet with
the approval of the Conservative Homelessness Foundation and
its Advisory Panel made up of all the leading homelessness
organisations in this country.
HOUSE ARREST A report into the rise in the number of homeless people
arrested each year.
15th November 2008
A 27% rise in the number of homeless arrests over the
past 5
years*.
Taking this average and applying it across forces in
England,
Wales and Scotland the total number of homeless people
arrested would have risen from 30,675 in 2003 to 39,011
in 2007.
In 2007, 27 forces reported a total of 33,464 arrests of
people
with no fixed abode. This report estimates that the
number of
homeless people arrested last year was as high as
63,209.
The Police Forces able to provide a full 5 year data set
showed a 27% increase – a total of 2,125 - in the number
of people being arrested and recorded with no fixed
abode.
WOMEN AND HOMELESSNESS
A
report into the dramatic rise in the number of
women stranded without homes
3rd August 2008
Report includes
144,000
women appeared on council waiting lists in 2007, up from
80,000 in 2003, a 43% increase.
The number
of women being put into temporary accommodation,
including B&Bs, has risen steadily between 2003 and
2007, from 16,127 to 22,428. This represents a 44%
increase in the use of temporary accommodation.
More and
more women are being forced to wait in B&B accommodation
for more than six weeks, with rising from 399 in 2003 to
1328 in 2008, a 332% increase.
The number
of number of spaces in women only hostels has stalled
with only 46 new rooms becoming available between 2005
and 2008.
170 out of
248 councils have no hostel accommodation purely for
women.
Due to the
way the Department of Communities and Local Government
(CLG) collect information, data on the gender of
applicants for housing is often unrecorded or
unavailable, meaning that the situation women face is
not recognised by the government.
CRUMBLING FOUNDATIONS A report into Labour's Failures in Social Housing
24th April 2008
Report includes
After over a
decade in power the Government has failed to build more
homes and it has dramatically failed those on the
growing council house waiting list.
Almost
1.7million households are now on the social housing
waiting list.
This has
increased by 64% in the last ten years, and by 40,000 in
the last year alone.
The number
of homes built by local authorities has collapsed to
just 283 in 2006.
130,000
children are homeless - double that of ten years ago -
most as a direct result of the lack of social housing.
Private
house-building has also fallen in the last year.
Just 53% of
the dwellings built in 2006/7 were houses - down from
80% in 2000/1 . Creating a glut of flats and not enough
family homes.
The
Government is failing to meet their target of building
200,000 homes per annum - just 167,577 were built in
2006/7.
The
Government has no realistic chance of meeting their
target of 3 million homes by 2020
The report is downloadable
here as well as
a breakdown of the regional data
here.
PRISON BREAK Breaking the prison to homelessness cycle
6th March 2008
Report
includes
12,000 prisoners were released onto the street
with nowhere to go in 2005/06.
1,122 prisoners were released into homelessness
from high security prisons despite much higher
reoffending rates for those who do not have a
roof over their heads.
78,197 prisoners have been released with nowhere
to go in the last four years. This is the
equivalent to almost the entire current size of
the prison population.
In
the last four years, nearly one quarter of
prisoners have been released homeless.
Stable accommodation can reduce re-offending by
up to 20% by reducing the likelihood of so
called 'bed and breakfast crime' where
ex-prisoners re-offend in order to get a roof
over their heads.'
Listen to Today Program coverage
of reports release
here.
ROUGHLY SLEEPING
How a black hole in the street count leads to a
systematic
underestimate of the number of rough sleepers.
8th November 2007
Report
includes
Official Government statistics dramatically
underestimate the number of rough sleepers.
The
number of people sleeping rough is nearly 3
times greater than admitted in official
government figures.
A
flaw in the method of counting those sleeping
rough has resulted in the official nightly count
being 498 rough sleepers. However, this report
reveals that a more accurate estimate is 1,300
in England alone.
The current system
requires Local Authorities to provide a rough
sleepers estimate between the bracket of, for
example, 0 and 10. However the number is then
automatically reduced to zero, thereby
dramatically underestimating the number of
people sleeping rough each night.
The report is downloadable
here
and you can
download
the raw data spreadsheet
here.
THE COMPLETE GERM MAP OF BRITAIN
How the level of C-Difficile has been consistently
underreported in Britain because the government only
requires data for over 65s to be included in the
official data.
31st May 2007
Report
includes...
• The data collection error that means that 1 in 6
C-Diff cases is never reported in official
statistics
• A problem on the increase across the age range
• Which hospitals have the most C-Difficile with a
detailed ‘Germ Map’ of Britain
THE TAGGING GAME
How convicted criminals wearing electronic tags are
now four times more
likely to commit crime compared with when the Home
Detention Curfew
scheme was originally trialled.
POLICE ON THE BEAT
A
comprehensive new study into the alarming
level of assaults on front-line Police Officers.
26th April 2007
In 2006 a British Police Officer was assaulted on our
streets every 20 minutes. Despite 50 Home Offices Bills and
a multitude of other legislation it's becoming clear that
treating the symptoms by providing training and protective
equipment for our police isn't going to be enough. The
report concludes that what is required is a look at how
society itself needs to change.
Gershon but not
forgotten
A short
study into the effects of the Gershon Report
and Gordon Brown’s hidden civil servants.
21st March 2007
This report entitled 'Gershon But Not Forgotten' studies the
progress of the July 2004 Gershon Report in the light of
fresh evidence acquired through Parliamentary Questions,
National Statistic Office and National Audit Office studies.
The Government, and in particular the Chancellor Gordon
Brown, have consistently claimed that they are on course to
meet the targets set out by the Efficiency Review, is this
actually the case?
THE MESSY
BUSINESS OF CONCEPTION:
How The Postcode Lottery In NHS IVF Treatment Is Creating
'Baby Boundaries' For Childless Couples.
March 2007
In February 2004 the then Secretary of State for Health,
John Reid MP, announced that at least one cycle of IVF would
become widely available on the NHS for childless couples.
Three years later and the actual picture across the country
is confused with evidence suggesting that Primary Care
Trusts are tending to withdraw from providing IVF on the
NHS.
This report represents the most comprehensive study of IVF
treatment nationwide and concludes that the situation is
muddled and confused for those seeking infertility treatment
on the NHS.
REPORT INTO THE REASONS FOR THE NHS CANCELLING 1,000
OPERATIONS PER DAY A comprehensive investigation looks into what's behind
all those cancelled operations.
October 2006
The NHS cancels 1,000 operations every single day, but
surprisingly the reasons are less to do with insufficient
staff or a lack of beds and more about administrative errors
and dirty instruments.
Detailed data obtained by MP Grant Shapps surveys the
country's health providers and discovers some shocking
trends in elective surgery cancellation.
UNDERPERFORMANCE
OF THE
ASSETS RECOVERY AGENCY Set up by Tony Blair, the ARA has cost £60 million to
date
but has only recovered £8.3 million.
June 2006
Launched in a blaze of publicity, the Assets Recovery Agency
was intended to have criminals quaking in their boots. Three
years on and this report by Grant Shapps MP revealed that
the Agency had cost four times more to run than it had ever
recovered, thereby breaking its own key target of being
self-financing.
Shortly after this report was published in June 2006 the
head of the ARA resigned and in January 2007 the Government
announced that it would merge the ARA into the Serious
Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). An early demise for the
Agency that Tony Blair claimed would put an end to the
'champagne lifestyles’ that many criminals have been
enjoying.
Read Tony Blair's Daily Express ARA launch article from Feb
2003
here.
Download the BBC File On 4 which partially attributes the
demise of the Assets Recovery Agency to the Shapps report
here. This is an
MP3. You can play the programme directly by clicking the
play button under the report.
REPORT INTO
REGIONAL INCONSISTENCIES REGARDING RETENTION OF INNOCENT
CHILDREN'S DNA DATA ACROSS ENGLAND AND WALES How the Government have allowed 24,000 children who have
never been charged or cautioned with any crime to remain on
the National Police DNA Database.
January 2006
When this report was released in January 2006 it led the
national news for the day. It reveals that 24,000 children,
many of whom will have never committed any crime, have found
there way onto the Police National DNA Database.
This report spurred a national drive to have them removed
and you can find more information at the
http://www.cond.org.uk
website.
