Parents with degrees encourage their children, on average, 166,000 times a year and criticise them 26,000 times, while parents on benefits deliver only 26,000 encouragements and 57,000 discouragements. This is one of the factors which explain unequal child development. Children respond better to carrots than sticks. Another is parents’ marital status: studies show that being born outside a stable relationship is strongly correlated with poor outcomes for a child, as is family break-up.

My own children, who were raised in a more bracing regime, must think I was secretly on Universal Credit during their formative years, but I believe their emotional scars are healing now. For others, particularly the children of single parents, the effects are longer-lasting. Nearly one in six births in England is to a single mother. In other comparable European countries, the ratio is closer to one in twenty.

This family breakdown problem, which has a major impact on outcomes for British children, is given full weight by Paul Johnson, who has written Challenging Inequalities as part of a team convened by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which he used to head. However, family issues fade into the background