Britannia Radio

TELEGRAPH   15.12.08
 From knife crime to immigration, you can never believe a Labour 
statistic
Figures showing that inner-city knife crime had "fallen" were 
trumpeted by ministers last week - but the truth was rather different.

By Philip Johnston

We have become so accustomed to the Government's jiggery-pokery with 
official statistics that it is tempting to dismiss the latest episode 
as par for the course.

But even the most world-weary observer was taken aback by the abuse 
of knife crime figures, allegedly collected by the police, to further 
Labour's political ends.

Ministers, who act increasingly as though they are in pre-election 
mode, sought to claim that recent police action was curbing one of 
the scourges of our inner cities.

Statistics suggesting that big inroads had been made by the 
Government's Tackling Knives Action Programme were selectively 
briefed (no leak inquiry there, then) to the BBC and a tabloid 
newspaper. They duly reported how a crackdown in 10 hot spot crime 
areas had been a great success.

On television, the Home Secretary trumpeted an overall reduction in 
the number of young hooligans caught carrying knives and said they 
were receiving stiffer sentences. Even Gordon Brown muscled in to 
bask in the reflected glory.

Apart from the accompanying, and highly questionable, claims that 
violent crime overall is falling, this was nothing exceptional. 
Indeed, it was heartening to discover that concerted police action - 
patrolling the streets and routinely stopping and searching young men 
for knives - was having an impact.

However, suspicions were aroused when the Home Office refused to 
publish the detailed statistics, bizarrely citing "police 
confidentiality".
The truth soon emerged: the official statisticians did not want any 
figures released because they were incomplete and had not been 
subject to proper methodological scrutiny.

But they were overruled by 10 Downing Street, where officials were 
intent on manufacturing a good news story to support Mr Brown as he 
launched a new anti-crime initiative.

By leaking the "figures", the Government guaranteed favourable, 
almost uncritical, news coverage on the BBC, which pumped them out 
for hours before they began to unravel later in the day.

Ministerial spin doctors are cynical enough to consider this a good 
result. They had succeeded in placing in the public domain the 
perception that knife crime was falling even if it wasn't true.

Anyone who later criticised the absence of detailed statistics could 
be dismissed as a curmudgeon or someone with a political axe to grind.
The Government, however, had reckoned without the diligence of Sir 
Michael Scholar, head of the new UK Statistics Authority, which was 
set up by Mr Brown ostensibly to show how different he was from his 
predecessor. He was the Roundhead to Mr Blair's Cavalier.

Perhaps he hoped that Sir Michael, a former top civil servant, would 
prove as toothless a watchdog as all the other regulators and 
commissions set up to provide cover for hypocritical behaviour.

But Sir Michael showed that he can bite. In a letter to Downing 
Street, he wrote: "The publication of prematurely released and 
unchecked statistics is corrosive of public trust in official 
statistics, and incompatible with the high standards which we are all 
seeking to establish."

Brazenly, ministers are trying to extract some credit from this 
shameful episode, claiming that if they had not set up the statistics 
authority they would never have been caught out.

Perhaps this was the motivation for establishing the new body - the 
Government realised it needed help from a sort of Statistics 
Anonymous: "My name is New Labour and I am a compulsive liar.
"
Just a few months ago. Professor David Hand, head of the Royal 
Statistical Society, criticised "serious" bad practices during the 
release of immigration figures.

Last year, statistics purporting to show that violent crime fell in 
the weeks after pubs were allowed to extend opening hours were found 
to be about as reliable as the wheat harvest figures released in 
Pyongyang.
Another trick is to release alternative sets of data, often compiled 
using different methodologies or baselines, and then highlight the 
figures that are least damaging.

Its most sophisticated practitioners reside in the Treasury, where 
hundreds of billions of pounds can disappear from the national debt 
depending on how you define the public sector balance sheet, and a 
fall in the productivity of state-run services can be transformed 
into a rise.

It is easy to say that all governments do this - they do, though not 
on such an industrial scale as this one. But it does matter. When I 
went to see Sir Michael before he began work chairing the Statistics 
Authority he was confident of restoring public trust in official data.

He likened its creation to the decision to give independence to the 
Bank of England in 1997. "Good statistics are as important as sound 
money or clean water," he said.

He now appreciates what a poisoned well it is.