Miserable children

I had to laugh out loud in the car on the way home from standing committee last night. I often have Radio 4 on in the car, engine starts up for a ten minute journey, and I catch some snippet of something.

Last night, the programme was Analysis, looking at the UNICEF report that said Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in a developed nation. No, the laugh-out-loud (shortened to LOL, by the way) moment wasn’t the continuity reader accidentally calling us an undeveloped nation, although that was funny.

It was the first contribution to the discussion made by Beverley Hughes, UK Government Minister for Children.

Andrew Brown (presenting):

The most recent dent to this confidence came from a report produced for Unicef, which claimed that British children were the least happy in Europe: only the United States, among developed nations, was a worse place to grow up in. Beverley Hughes is the Minister for Children.

Beverley Hughes:

I don’t accept that those are a fair picture necessarily of children and young people today and that’s because the report drew from surveys that were done in 2000 and 2003 of young people who were aged between 11 and 15 at that time; and that means those are children and young people who were born between about 1985 and 1992 and spent most of their formative years not under a Labour government and of course who’d now be, at the time when the report was published, something between 16 and 22 years old.

That’s alright – that explains everything then!