OPINION25 November 2011

Are politicians scared of being caught spinning statistics?

The government has once again attracted the attention of the UK Statistics Authority for its handling of official figures.

The government has once again attracted the attention of the UK Statistics Authority for its handling of official figures.

This time they stand accused of trying to bury bad news. Prime Minister David Cameron launched his new housing strategy with much fanfare on Monday – just one day before the release of statistics that showed just how few affordable homes are actually being built (just 454 across the whole country between April and September this year, and none at all in some areas). Housing charity Shelter called the figures “shocking” – but Monday’s high-profile coverage of the government’s policies was untainted by those numbers.

The UK Statistics Authority is looking into the handling of the announcement, but the government strongly denies that there was anything cynical about the timing.

As the BBC’s Mark Easton puts it: “Ministers reject any suggestion that they timed their big announcement on building affordable homes to come 24 hours before the worst ever statistics on building affordable homes.”

The government’s explanation is that the lull in new builds is due to a hiatus between the previous grant-based house building scheme and the new one. They claim that as many as 170,000 affordable homes will be built in the next three years.

Since the Statistics Authority was set up in 2008, several ministers and officials have had their knuckles rapped for mishandling official figures, with stats on crime and immigration seeming to hold the strongest temptation for spin.

The infractions fall into two main categories: twisting the stats to paint a misleading picture, and pre-empting them with cherry-picked figures or positive announcements to soften the blow. London mayor Boris Johnson, immigration minister Damian Green and Labour’s former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith have all felt the authority’s wrath.

But do they care? Smith apologised for releasing unchecked stats on knife crime, and a Home Office official said sorry in 2008 for gatecrashing a Statistics Authority press conference on immigration figures to hand out ministerial statements. But Johnson and Green shrugged off criticism for releasing cherry-picked stats early.

Green also got off rather lightly for claiming in September that “after years of net migration increasing relentlessly, the figures stabilised in the last quarter of 2010” – a rather self-serving interpretation for a minister who took office in mid-2010, and one that the Statistics Authority pointed out bears little relation to its data.

Furthermore, the consensus that the Statistics Authority should be given more power seems to have evaporated since the election, with ministers now claiming that limiting the advance access they get to newly published statistics would not be workable.

On this morning’s Today programme, housing minister Grant Shapps certainly sounded ruffled when asked about the timing of Monday’s announcement in relation to the release of the figures. He argued that rescheduling it would only have heightened accusations of spin, saying “you just can’t win, whatever you do with these things”.

The real question is whether being seen to manipulate official statistics (or to manipulate the news agenda around them) is more embarrassing for a politician than what the statistics actually show. Do the headlines about ministers being told off for spinning the statistics reach anything like as wide an audience as the story that they used the numbers to tell? And when the public is already so cynical about government statistics, what risk is there for an individual politician who misuses them?

Currently it’s hard to say. But handing control of official statistics to an independent authority has certainly made things tougher for them. And when, as happened with this week’s housing announcement, perceived attempts to control the news agenda become news stories in themselves, ministers certainly need to think twice.

2 Comments

12 years ago

Dave Cameron is a bullshitting little bitch. I hate immigrants and I hate the MPs that don't do anything hard at all. They are all traitors. Fuck Dave Cameron the little Lying bitch. He's a false waste of leadership. Most MPs are weak little bitches full of political correctivness but are full of errors in the process. Migrants are like a virus in a computer and Dave Cameron needs updating useless firewall he is a wet bitch

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12 years ago

It's whether govt ministers have already fallen into habits of manipulation and denigration of watchdogs. What's really dismaying is how little resistance mainstream civil servants put up to ministers when it comes to bending and spinning: the UKStats Authority ought to insist the new head of the civil service gets on this case

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