Only a third of recommendations to tackle endemic racism in UK implemented
Only a third of the recommendations from major reports commissioned to tackle endemic racism in the UK over the past 40 years have actually been implemented, a Guardian investigation has found.
The Guardian's analysis – published ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Black Lives Matter protests – has led experts involved in some of those inquiries to demand the government break the 'doom loop' of inaction.
In the face of rightwing backlash against equalities work, they urged ministers to act on the hundreds of recommendations that have been ignored.
The Guardian analysed 12 reports into racial inequalities commissioned by ministers since 1981, often in response to scandals and unrest – such as the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Windrush scandal.
Of the nearly 600 recommendations – which span education, business, health, the criminal justice system, and community cohesion – Guardian analysis found that fewer than a third had been fully actioned, and that progress on others had been reversed or significantly eroded during years of government austerity policies.
Just under a third of recommendations were not implemented at all. The remainder were either only partly implemented, often in symbolic, limited or inconsistent ways, or were too vague or difficult to measure.
Labour MPs said the UK was trapped in 'a performative cycle', where a crisis prompted a report to be commissioned to 'diffuse anger' and its recommendations were later quietly shelved.
Prof Ted Cantle, the former chief executive of Nottingham city council, led the community cohesion review team after 2001 riots in northern towns with predominantly white and Asian populations.
Analysis by the Guardian has suggested that of his recommendations, an estimated 5% had been fully implemented, while more than a third had not been implemented at all. The rest had been partly implemented or were deemed not measurable for this analysis.
Cantle said: 'We're in this doom loop where a riot happens or there's an acknowledgment of some sort of issue, a review happens and the recommendations aren't really taken up and then the process starts again.'
After last year's riots, Cantle renewed the call he first made in 2001 for a community cohesion strategy. 'There is no doubt in my mind that there has to be, at the heart of government, an agency, a department, that is focused on developing cohesion and provides a national strategy, a national narrative, which is then implemented at the local level by the local government, by voluntary agencies.'
Lord Victor Adebowale, the chair of the NHS Confederation, made 28 recommendations after his 2021 review of mental health and policing, which examined the disproportionate number of Black men dying in police custody.
Analysis suggested an estimated 14% of his recommendations have been fully implemented, while around a quarter was ignored. 'A healthy society is an equitable society,' he said. 'It's one that understands individuals, communities and the interactions between them in such a way that they can provide appropriate services.'
Since the riots that broke out in the UK last summer, the rightwing Reform party has taken control of 10 councils, vowing to target equality, diversity and inclusion policies, while Keir Starmer has said the UK risked becoming 'an island of strangers' without further controls on immigration.
Adebowale told the Guardian that while it has become easier to 'pander to prejudice [than] to lead progressively', stark racial inequalities remain as 'successive governments, not just this one, fail to accept the systemic nature of race discrimination'.
He said: 'If you look at the stats, Black men are still disproportionately detained. If you pick any one of the major disease categories, you'll find that Black people have a greater, worse experience and worse outcomes. You look at cancer, Black people are likely to discover they've got stage four in A&E. If you look at mental health, they have a worse experience and worse outcomes … on and on it goes.'
Adebowale said if all of the 27 recommendations he made had been implemented, he was 'pretty certain' that some deaths since 'wouldn't have occurred'.
The Guardian's analysis found that some recommendations made in official reports produced since 1981 were implemented initially but later dropped or significantly altered.
Several recommendations from the 2001 Cantle report were introduced under the Blair and Brown governments – for example, the requirement for Ofsted to inspect and report on the public duty on schools to promote community cohesion, the expansion of Sure Start to support disadvantaged children early and prevent disengagement from education, and other youth outreach work such as Connexions Service.
However, these programmes were substantially defunded during the coalition government's austerity drive in the 2010s, and many were later dismantled entirely under the subsequent Conservative majority government.
Some recommendations, such as Adebowale's on developing safer models on restraint, come up again in later reports. The issue of deadly use of restraint, particularly those in the prone position, came up four years later in the Angiolini review in 2017, yet multiple individuals have died in custody while being restrained, including in prone-position holds.
Many recommendations the Guardian assessed to have now been fully implemented were first made decades ago, resurfacing in two or even three subsequent reviews before finally being acted on – often after 10 or even 20 years.
Others, such as the call for police forces and teaching staff to reflect the communities they serve, or for the curriculum to meaningfully reflect Britain's racial diversity, have been repeatedly recommended but remain unmet.
The Guardian's snapshot analysis builds on earlier work by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Centre for Public Data.
While a majority of recommendations made over five decades have not led to policy changes in the public sector, David Tyler, who co-chaired the Parker review which made recommendations to the private sector, said big business has acted.
The Parker review set FTSE 100 businesses a deadline of having one minority ethnic board member by 2021, and also said each FTSE 250 board should have at least one director of colour by 2024.
The review's yearly update earlier this year found that 95% of FTSE 100 companies now have one minority ethnic board member, while 86% of FTSE 200 companies could say the same.
Tyler said: 'Broadly, unless you're talking about the very recent past, which has been influenced above all by Donald Trump and Maga, it's moved in the right direction in terms of the attitude of business people to take the best possible talent from the ethnic minorities in the UK.'
Nonetheless, the number of recommendations made to the state that have been 'shelved' meant the UK was 'trapped in a performative cycle' when it comes to racial inequality in the UK, the Labour MP Clive Lewis said.
'This research sadly confirms what many of us have long suspected: when it comes to race equality in the UK, we are trapped in a performative cycle – crisis, commission, then conveniently shelved recommendations.
'From Scarman to Macpherson to Lammy, we've seen inquiry after inquiry confirm what racialised communities already know: that systemic racism is real, it's persistent, and it's baked into the institutions that shape our lives. But instead of acting on those truths, successive governments have treated these reviews as fire blankets – designed to smother outrage, not spark change,' said Lewis.
The Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy urged the government to act. She said: 'Looking at the British state's track record, you could be forgiven for thinking the main purpose of race inquiries past has been to diffuse anger around the many inequalities facing Black communities in our country and divert attention away from securing real change.'
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40 minutes ago
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I run a French university course on why Britain is such a mess – I won't run out of material
Your 60-minute exam on 'Public Policy Failure and the British State: A History in Twelve Case Studies' starts…. now. Turn the page and read Clarissa Eden's diary entry for November 4 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and answer the question: 'Do the personalities involved in a given policy failure matter as much, if not more than, the ideas themselves?' Bon courage! For the past three years, 38-year-old Oxford academic Oliver Lewis has been teaching an oversubscribed course at Sciences Po – the Paris university that produced six of France's last eight presidents – while researching a DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) on UK rail privatisation as a 'case study in British public policy failure, 1985-1997'. The source of Lewis's inspiration, he believes, was his father's scientific expertise in materials failure. After earning degrees in History and Politics at the London School of Economics and King's College London – and a short stint in financial services – Lewis was unable to shake off his interest in a different sort of failure, dating back to his study of the privatisation of British Rail for A-level Economics. Having enrolled at Oxford for his DPhil, he won a year's fellowship to Sciences Po in 2021 as part of an exchange programme. The following year, he was asked to develop a 12-week course. It has now been taken by over 200 French, British and other international students at the university dubbed ' la fabrique des élites ' (the elite factory). 'Regardless of citizenship, there is a universal curiosity in a country that has gone from one of the richest in the world to a mediocre one,' says Lewis. 'There is definitely a general feeling that something has gone deeply wrong for Britain. When I tell people that my DPhil is on railways and public policy failure, they say, 'Well, you won't run out of material'.' There has certainly been no shortage of recent stories highlighting problems with Britain's rail infrastructure. In December, The Telegraph reported on an 18-mile line in Northumberland – a victim of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s – which took three decades to be rebuilt after plans for its reopening were first mooted in the 1990s. When work finally began in 2019, the £160 million project was due to be completed by spring 2023. It eventually opened in December 2024, by which time the estimated cost had nearly doubled to £298 million – and only two of its six stations were ready. Nevertheless, the curiosity displayed by Lewis's enthusiastic students appears untainted by any contempt for the country they have been studying. 'I have always been a fan of the UK,' says Milan Wojcieszek, a 23-year-old Polish student at the University of Amsterdam, currently on a year-long exchange at Sciences Po. 'I admire your newspaper culture and the civilised way in which you debate in Parliament. But for me, Brexit appeared an irrational decision in a country where everything seemed to be going right, and I wanted to understand the motivations behind it better. 'I still like the British attitude, but the course put an end to the picture in my head that people from western Europe have a superior intellect when it comes to statecraft. It raised my national self-esteem: if these guys can f--- up, maybe we're not so stupid.' But what about his French classmates, the Pompidous, Mitterands and Chiracs of the future? Did they enjoy a good laugh about l es Rosbifs while quietly taking notes on mistakes to avoid? 'I did not see a visible enthusiasm for smirking about their arch-rivals shooting themselves in the foot,' says Wojcieszek, who hopes to become an entrepreneur when he graduates. 'I guess what I saw was more sympathy and curiosity.' Wojcieszek's classmate Amélie Destombes, a second-year student at King's College London currently on secondment to Sciences Po, confirms the impression that Britain is a fascinating country to study – if not for the most reassuring reasons. 'I've had conversations with many French students who have brought up Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Boris Johnson – so there's a pretty bad reputation,' she says. Brexit is often the hook that attracts European students to Lewis's course – although many might be unaware that he stood for Reform, originally founded as the Brexit Party, in last year's general election for the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr seat, where he came second to Labour. Now no longer active in the party, Lewis adopts a rigorously apolitical stance in his seminars. 'Our duty is to truth, not to subjectivity or opinion,' he explains. In any case, he argues, 'it's too early to tell' with Brexit. Instead, he roots his teaching in historical method, blending aspects of anthropology and law, as befits Sciences Po's interdisciplinary approach. This results in a 12-part lecture series on the 'long 20th century' that seeks to understand 'how we got to this malaise,' what lessons can be learnt for other countries, and whether British decline is reversible. The course begins with the First World War, a well-documented event, before exploring three further foreign policy failures: appeasement in the 1930s, the Partition of India in 1947, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. It then shifts focus to domestic issues, covering Northern Ireland, comprehensive education, the 'financialisation' of the economy, the poll tax, rail privatisation – which Lewis estimates has cost taxpayers over £120 billion – and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs). This shift in focus reflects the changing role of a state that, over the past 100 years, has been asked to do more with less. 'For most of its history, the British state dealt only with defence and with imperial concerns,' explains Lewis. 'Its culture and institutions were designed to serve a different purpose. They are, therefore, not terribly efficacious when it comes to solving domestic problems. Britain is in a uniquely unfortunate position because its global role coincided with a domestic economy that could not shoulder its defence burden.' This, Lewis says, did deep, long-term damage, meaning the country 'could not adjust to its drastically reduced role post 1970, with the result that domestic public policy has been poorly planned, poorly executed – and at times poorly financed too.' Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, a distinguished political scientist, is the author of The Blunders of Our Governments, which features on the reading list for Lewis's course – alongside films such as Rogue Trader (the Nick Leeson biopic), and The Navigators, Ken Loach's story of Sheffield rail workers affected by privatisation. 'It's hard to say if Britain is appreciably worse than other countries such as Italy, France or Germany,' he says. 'But it's difficult to imagine students in Britain being very interested in the mistakes of those countries.' The Blunders of Our Governments, co-authored with the late Prof Anthony King and published in 2013, includes well-known British disasters such as the Millennium Dome and membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, as well as more niche blunders like New Labour's individual learning accounts and the Child Support Agency spending two years chasing a childless gay man over a daughter who didn't exist. The book argues that the British political system suffers from a dwindling talent pool, limited understanding of project management, ineffective checks and balances and inconsequential penalties for failure. Although decisive governments can make effective policy, it is just as easy for incompetent ministers to make bad decisions – a problem that has worsened since the Thatcher and Blair governments. 'With the best will in the world, I have found it difficult to identify successes since 2010,' says Crewe, who is currently working on a new edition of the book covering fresh blunders such as austerity, High Speed 2 and Covid. 'Even when I ask Conservative commentators, it's pretty thin gruel.' Lewis's course at Sciences Po concludes with the Iraq War, before devoting the final lecture to a handful of public policy successes, including PAYE and Bank of England inflation targeting, followed by a plenary discussion on the past and the future. 'My main takeaway is that, when we make policy, it impacts real people,' says Destombes, who hopes to work in British public policy after graduating. 'There needs to be better research on the communities that are affected.' Gabriel Ward, a third-year student at the LSE who took the course at the same time, cites Nicholas Ridley – the Cabinet minister responsible for introducing Thatcher's poll tax (and the son of a viscount) – dismissing people's financial worries by saying, 'Well, they could always sell a picture.' 'There's a disconnect between policy makers and those who would feel it most,' says Ward. 'I was constantly struck by the gap between ideology and practicality.' Wojcieszek's conclusion is that even a strong political system can lead to bad decision making. 'It reinforced my belief that what really matters is visionary leaders who can propose something unpopular,' he says. Lewis wants his students to 'leave with a knowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as they can be powerful.' But inevitably, he has some interesting ideas himself on how Britain might extricate itself from problems that began last century and have worsened since the millennium. 'I used to think that dealing with Britain's 'issues' would be a 30-year project,' he says. 'I now think it's a 50-year one. In the short run, the solution is attracting the best human capital into politics. In the long run, it's education. The education of our future political elite is a massive burning platform.' Lewis is an admirer of the French lycée system, as well as the strong sense of national pride at Sciences Po, where 'virtually every corridor has a tricolour and its primary duty is to the people of France.' Dismissing claims in a recent book that Sciences Po is a hotbed of woke radicalism – 'This obviously afflicts all institutions' – Lewis applauds 'the genius of de Gaulle and the reset of the 1950s,' which Britain has never had, with the possible limited exception of the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service reforms of the 19th century, aimed at moving away from patronage and towards a meritocratic system. 'Our electoral system creates a duopoly in which there's no market for ideas,' he says. 'We've never really had a proper conversation about the role of the state in our lives. 'An absence of vision and standards seems to affect every branch of the British state. It's now at emergency levels. Britain's standard of living is on course to be overtaken by Poland's by 2030. The electorate is not going to accept that decline. Something will have to give.'
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40 minutes ago
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Rape victims can challenge dropped cases after sexsomnia fiasco
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An 'important first step' Ms McCrossen-Nethercott received £35,000 in compensation and an apology from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for its decision to drop the case before the evidence had been tested in court. She contacted police in 2017 because she thought she had been raped while asleep. She said she had woken up half-naked, finding her necklace broken on the floor. But charges were dropped by the CPS days before a trial was scheduled to begin after lawyers for the alleged perpetrator claimed Ms McCrossen-Nethercott had sexsomnia – a medically recognised, but rare, sleep disorder that causes a person to engage in sexual acts while asleep. She welcomed the pilot scheme to be run in the West Midlands as an 'important first step'. 'It can't undo the harm already done to victims like me, but it's real, tangible progress, and I hope it marks the beginning of a fairer system, one where victims' voices are not just heard, but acted on,' said Ms McCrossen-Nethercott. Victims already have the right to challenge a decision not to charge suspects once it has been taken, but the pilot scheme will extend that right to before prosecutors decide to drop a case. 'Make Britain's streets safer' Lucy Rigby, Labour MP and Solicitor General, wrote in an article for The Telegraph: 'The existing scheme is already an important tool in delivering justice, but this new commitment from the CPS will extend that right, so that victims are further empowered to question decisions made in their cases, resulting in fewer cases falling through the cracks and more offenders brought to justice. 'Beginning on Friday, the pilot will become operational in the West Midlands. If it is a success, we will look to extend this across the country to support all victims of rape and serious sexual assaults. 'We know there is much to do to fix the justice system. But this is a vital step towards building the system that victims deserve and ultimately make Britain's streets safer.' Just one in 40 (2.6 per cent) rape offences resulted in a charge in the year ending March 2024, up from 2.1 per cent in the previous year, but a fraction of the 12 per cent charge rate in 2014. Labour has committed to halving violence against women and girls and will publish its strategy on how to achieve that this summer. The plan has inherited a series of initiatives by the last government and police, including an overhaul to focus investigations on perpetrators rather than testing the credibility of victims. Police chiefs have pledged to apply the same investigative and disruptive tactics to rapists as they do to organised crime bosses, where they are pursued by police even if victims withdraw their complaints. We can't leave victims to go on suffering Our broken criminal justice system is in dire need of repair, which is why our pilot scheme aims to empower victims of rape and sexual assault to question decisions made in their cases, writes Lucy Rigby KC MP. Too often, victims of violence against women and girls are let down by our criminal justice system, compounding what is already a traumatic experience. I have strong views on the reasons why. Chief among them: 14 years of governments whose approach was nothing short of negligent. This resulted in too few bobbies on the beat, overflowing prisons and a record backlog in our courts, leaving victims of very serious crimes waiting years to see perpetrators in court. In short, a broken criminal justice system in desperate need of repair. The impact on victims and public trust in the justice system was significant. A creaking criminal justice system undermines one of the basic principles fundamental to our democracy: the rule of law. That is to say the law applies to everyone equally and all must have access to justice. This happened despite the work of thousands of dedicated public servants to protect us all. I've met many of them – including the prosecutors from across the country that dedicate their careers to sifting through evidence, often in harrowing crimes, to build a case and pursue justice on behalf of victims. Empowering rape victims This Government has begun the difficult task of fixing our criminal justice system as part of the Plan for Change, in which we pledge to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. To achieve this, we are putting domestic abuse specialists into 999 control rooms, introducing new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders, doing more to effectively tackle spiking, stalking and coercive behaviour. That means better support in place for victims and giving them the confidence that specialists are helping them. These changes will also see more police on our streets, locking up abusers, but importantly – getting quicker justice and support for those suffering at the hands of perpetrators of these horrific crimes. As Solicitor General, I've heard heart-wrenching accounts of women's experience of the criminal justice system – sometimes lasting years – which have seriously impacted their mental health, wellbeing and relationships. We cannot let this go on, which is why we are ensuring that adult victims of rape and serious sexual offences will have access to a dedicated victim liaison officer, as well as pre-trial meetings, so that they feel more prepared for court. The right to question But we have to do more. In particular, it is vital that our criminal justice system further empowers victims to best navigate it. It was Prime Minister Keir Starmer who, as the director of public prosecutions, launched the Victims' Right to Review Scheme in 2013, to give victims and bereaved families the right to challenge decisions not to charge suspects or drop cases. Leading victims' rights voices, like Jade Blue McCrossen-Nethercott, the Centre for Women's Justice, Dame Vera Baird and Claire Waxman OBE, the Victims' Commissioner, have recognised the success of this scheme and that is why we are extending it to better support more victims. A new pilot launched this week will give survivors of rape and serious sexual assault the right to have their case reviewed before CPS makes any final decisions. Currently, criminal cases can be stopped at any point if a prosecutor decides there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. For the first time, survivors of rape or serious sexual abuse will be offered the right to request a review by a different prosecutor before their case is dropped. Where a review finds that the initial decision was wrong, the case against the accused will continue. A system victims deserve The existing scheme is already an important tool in delivering justice, but this new commitment from the CPS will extend that right, so that victims are further empowered to question decisions made in their cases, resulting in fewer cases falling through the cracks and more offenders brought to justice. Beginning on Friday, the pilot will become operational in the West Midlands. If it is a success, we will look to extend this across the country to support all victims of rape and serious sexual assaults. We know there is much to do to fix the justice system. But this is a vital step towards building the system that victims deserve and ultimately make Britain's streets safer.
Telegraph
41 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Northern Ireland's most exciting novelist – who's making her debut in her 50s
To her pupils, she is still Ms Erskine, head of English at a Belfast secondary school. But a mid-life foray into fiction writing now means Wendy Erskine has a second identity as one of Northern Ireland's hottest new authors. So instead of discussing a Greek myth with a Key Stage 3 class or something by Tennessee Williams with her A Level students, Erskine, who is 57, is in London to discuss her own debut novel. The Benefactors is a polyphonic narrative about Belfast, class, parenting, and the aftermath of a sexual assault, served up with an undertow of politics. 'The Troubles is in the deep structure [of the book]. To me, it is in the deep structure of life in Northern Ireland,' she tells me, sipping a coffee in the basement cafe at The Ragged School, a Victorian free school set up by Dr Barnardo. Her novel is the latest in a wave of cultural lodestones drawing attention to Northern Ireland. She reels off a list, which ranges from TV dramas such as Blue Lights and Derry Girls to the controversial rap trio Kneecap, notorious for their inflammatory political messages. Books such as Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, Anna Burns's Milkman and Michael Magee's Close to Home also come to mind. 'They have all been instrumental, one way or another, in developing a greater awareness of the place in all its strangeness and sadness and energy and beauty,' she says, the spit of 1970s-era Debbie Harry, with her blonde blunt fringe, her green short-sleeved sweater a perfect match with the cafe's artily peeling walls. This doesn't mean The Troubles are having a cultural moment, she adds. 'With respect, we're talking about 3,500 people having been killed.' In her novel, 'the benefactors' of the title are a group of parents trying to atone for their sons' crimes. Benefactors is also the name of a sleazy website – also known as Bennyz – where men make payments, or 'beneficence', to women for talking dirty and more. 'This place, the Ragged School,' she says, pointing to the room we're in, 'is celebrating something good but I'm also looking at the more pejorative dimension of the benefactor. The idea that the benefactor is getting something out of [their charity]. That they're possibly on a bit of an ego trip.' 'Beneficence. Sounds so fancy,' thinks Misty Johnston, a central protagonist in the novel, whose Bennyz profile is based on the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Johnston's Bennyz outfit is a white blouse with a lace collar and black satin ribbon bow to stand out from the booty-short-and-bra-top-wearing girls, although she draws the line at copying the Victorian poet's actual hairstyle – 'like she had just got a really good curly blow dry, except someone had flatted it on top… She's hoping to make at least a little bit of cash,' Erskine writes, her deadpan humour one of the book's many joys. (Her Instagram bio – 'lady writer not on the TV' – is a play on the Dire Straits song, Lady Writer. 'I was poking fun at my obscurity,' she says, smiling.) Double-edged narratives are Erskine's forte, something she discovered by chance in 2015 after using her free Monday afternoons to take a six-month fiction workshop run by Dublin-based Stinging Fly magazine. She 'fell into short story writing' after Declan Meade, the Stinging Fly publisher, asked her to put together a collection. 'I was 49 and I knew this was a one-off opportunity. I tried to appear all dynamic and said, 'I could write you a story every six weeks.'' The upshot, Sweet Home, which was set in east Belfast and published in Ireland by Stinging Fly Press in 2018, was a searing success. A second, equally lauded, collection, Dance Move, followed in 2022. Short story writing hadn't appealed initially. 'You know how people talk about them, the silversmithing metaphors: every word in its place, burnished. I found that really off-putting.' But they were a 'pragmatic choice' because they didn't take long. 'It's a very democratic form. If you have stuff going on, there is a satisfaction in getting a short story completed. And I absolutely adored it. I realised how flexible they are.' What they weren't was 'rookie prep' for a novel – at least not intentionally. What changed was wanting to stick with the same characters. 'I thought it would be gorgeous for me to get to reside in a world for longer than six or seven weeks,' she says. Her familiarity with the short story form also pushed her to try something different with her novel, which features cameos from 50 different voices reacting to the book's central drama, a sexual assault. The floating first voice eases us into what happened. 'When I heard them talking the other week in the shop, about that girl Misty and those three rich guys, to be fair I didn't know what to think, I mean, Bennyz and all that, but when I checked her out online she was nowhere near as slutty looking as I thought she'd be.' A second fragmented voice describes the house where the assault occurs. 'The weeping cherry is, to my mind, the most elegant tree… There is one in the neighbouring front garden. Sad to say, in that house some boys are meant to have taken advantage of a young girl,' Erskine writes, before turning to one of the main characters, Frankie, who is stepmother to one of the 'rich guys' named by the first voice. 'I didn't want a novel I could tell as a short story. I wanted something energetic and complicated with a cacophony of voices,' she adds. 'It's arbitrary who writers choose to be their central characters. Often when I'm reading, there will be a scene between two characters in a cafe, and I'm wondering what the waiter is thinking or the person at the next table.' It's an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting, rather like Erskine, who makes me long to be re-taking A-level English provided I get her as my teacher. Have any of her students read her work? She laughs. 'I don't think I've ever had a conversation with any pupils about my writing. Worlds end up being compartmentalised.' In a quirk of the Northern Irish exam system, which may help to account for their superior share of top grades compared with England and Wales, students can choose two of the novels they study for A-level English. 'They have to get approval from the exam board but I'd be delighted and thrilled if they wanted to read The Benefactors,' she says. Erskine, who is married with two grown-up children, admits trying her hand once before at writing something long-form, when she was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, teaching English after studying at Glasgow University. 'But it was dreadful,' she says. Now, though, she seems to be on a roll – with two film scripts, more short stories and another novel on the go, there is plenty more Erskine to come. She is sanguine about finding success in her 50s. 'This whole idea of the wunderkind thing, I love that, it's absolutely great. But I would query someone's judgement, to be honest, if they thought that the most exciting fiction was more likely to be written by someone under 35. Like, why? But neither do I think that older writers have universally achieved Zen wisdom. It just depends on the individual.' She adds: 'I think things have changed. There is more of an understanding that literature, that art in general, isn't necessarily the province of the young. I'd get very excited if someone in their 60s had their first novel out. That's a wow. That's interesting. I don't think [my stories] are young people's stories. 'I don't think this novel is a young person's novel. At the same time, that's a very seductive narrative to tell yourself, that things could only have worked out the way they've worked out. But you can't go back.' The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (£18.99, Sceptre) is out on June 19
