The Work of the Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority and National Statistician on Tuesday 21 October 2014.
Paul Flynn: Pursuing my spirit of curiosity, could you tell me if you think that the hope in the Act that set up the Statistics Authority, which was to persuade politicians, particularly Government, to be less cavalier in their use of statistics, has been achieved and been successful?
John Pullinger: Successful, yes; achieved, no. That would be my very short answer. It has been successful. In my paper, I describe as one of the successes of the last five years the role that Sir Michael Scholar and Sir Andrew Dilnot have played in putting a hand up and saying, “You shouldn’t mess with statistics. They’re far too important for that,” and doing that without fear or favour, coming in and making an intervention. It has made people more careful, and I would count that as a success. That is something we can bank and we can pursue.
Statistics are just another part of normal discourse, and they get used and abused in a natural human way. My concern is when it really undermines the currency. Before the Statistics Authority came into being, the reason the Act was debated and passed by Parliament was a concern the currency had been corroded and that was not good enough. There has been a successful turning of that tide and I expect that to continue. I observe on a daily basis that people are much more careful in the political space and also in the media space, but I do not think we can declare that the target has been achieved. It probably never will be, but progressively we can make it better.
Paul Flynn: Do you think that the Prime Minister was being very careful when he said that the Government is paying down its debts? You wrote about this and you gave the figures and very helpful charts on this, which show the debt as ever increasing. There are blue lines. This is a falsehood and, in fact, in the period involved, the Government has increased its debts by £435 billion over the original period. How would you describe this: a lie, a distortion, a falsehood, a mistake?
John Pullinger: On that occasion, the Prime Minister clearly misspoke. I heard him at another event a week later and he got it right; he said the Government is reducing the deficit. Whether or not that would have happened without the intervention, I do not know. We are in a spirit of general improvement here; the purpose of this is to make things better. I observed in that particular case an improvement in the space of a fortnight, in describing the numbers in a much more accurate way.
Paul Flynn: You can use language to distort the meaning, which I assume he did, but when he makes a clear statement, which you have rightly nailed as untrue, and says it is paying down its debts—at a Tory Party conference, I think it was—whereas in fact he is a small matter of £435 billion out in his claim, where do you get to the point when you have to embolden yourself, or the Authority has, to say, “The Prime Minister is lying; the Prime Minister is attempting to deceive the country”? The hope expressed by Andrew Dilnot before he had his present job, while the Bill was going through, was that that Bill setting up the Authority was the most significant Act of the last Government. There was a lot of truth in that—if it had worked, and if politicians of all parties were inhibited by the need to produce the objective truth, instead of going on some wild political hyperbole, which this was, surely.
John Pullinger: Each should make their own judgment, but my own judgment is that particular case was a success. There was a statement made. There was a reference made to the Authority to look at the validity of the statement. The Authority, as you have it in front of you, has made absolutely clear what claims can and cannot be justified on this, and the Prime Minister, in this case, is then accountable for whether he has misled or not. I think that is the system working. I think that is a very powerful act, and that would just not have happened had this Act not been passed.
Paul Flynn: I treasure a letter I received in answer to a worry expressed by a statistician that their work was going to be distorted by politicians. That letter was saying that this was a very unworthy suggestion that politicians would ever want to distort statistics and to pollute the work of statisticians. That letter was from Margaret Thatcher and I had it in 1988. Nothing seems to have changed, except the shock of politicians at any suggestions that they are misleading.
You wrote, on 9 October, to Mr David Hanson, about a comment by Mr James Brokenshire, who said, “We have cut net migration by a quarter since the peak under Labour.” You were asked how accurate or misleading that was. Would you like to comment on whether Mr Brokenshire’s statement gave a truthful impression?
John Pullinger: I am not going to comment on that particular case, but I am going to comment on the process, if I may. What we have with this Act, and what we have with the current Chair of the Statistics Authority, is a legal basis on which misstatements and falsehoods can be challenged in public. We have a Chairman who is very prepared to do that, without any fearfulness.
Paul Flynn: If you look at the truth of Mr Brokenshire’s statement, you have again provided very useful proof of this. The point he chose was one where there was a freakish increase in immigration and a drop in emigration. It happens to be there is suddenly a peak that goes up, and that is compared rather than any of the other periods over the 13 years. The clear trend you have here is one of increase and the graph is going skywards. The impression given by Mr Brokenshire was intended to be a false one. This is straight from the manual of how to lie with statistics. You have rightly, given the figures here, pointed out that immigration is increasing and has been increasing recently, and Mr Brokenshire’s statement is a falsehood. Can you come out? Do you think you can be less inhibited yourselves, nail them and say, “Look, the Government is lying on immigration; the Government is lying on the state of debt,” and challenge them in that way? This is the job that the Statistics Authority and you have been set up to do.
John Pullinger: From the Authority perspective, if I may say so, the kind of response you have in front of you is an even more potent critique of what was said than just a statement of an opinion. What we are doing here is putting out the evidence in a very clear way, which states our view on a particular case. That is out from our point of view. The extra thing is you now have that evidence as well, by which to challenge the Member on the Floor of the House or in any other situation.
Paul Flynn: You did another report or a comment in July about A and E waiting times and about how Government was further distorting the figures. We have a vigorous, hysterical campaign being run by one newspaper now, which is making a wholly unscientific comparison between NHS statistics in Wales and other parts of the United Kingdom. There was a scientific investigation of this carried out by the Nuffield Trust, which said that there was not that much difference between them, if you add them all up. There is now a campaign, which is propaganda dressed up as news, in the Daily Mail, which lies to their readers every day. This is then carried on by the other media, which reports what has been said. The impression is not one that is based on fact, science or any kind of objective examination. Do you as an authority feel that you should look at this and make a comparison between what is happening in the health services in the four countries, and report accordingly?
John Pullinger: If there is a case where the evidence base has been misrepresented or misreported, and that is brought to our attention, then the kinds of responses that you have in some of those other cases will be forthcoming. They will put the particular question into context.
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