If I were Prime Minister: I'd make sure our statistics were right

Our series in the run-up to the General Election – 100 days, 100 contributors, but no politicians – continues with the Director of Full Fact

It’s an unsettling dream, to be Prime Minister. I’d find myself transformed into a mushroom: kept in the dark, fed manure, and reliving old problems at the dank crest of Westminster in Downing Street.

At the crux of the Battle of Britain, Churchill was told by Fighter Command that 375 enemy aircraft had been destroyed, a number which turned out later to be double what the German records showed. The following week he sent a memo: “I wish all statistics to be concentrated in my own branch as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, from which alone the final authoritative working statistics will issue.”

If I were Prime Minister I would send a memo summoning the Office for National Statistics to the front lines to help me sort a few things out.

NHS waiting times are measured differently in the UK’s four nations, so we can’t compare our health services. Nobody is counting the number of GP appointments that happen – so how am I supposed to know how much pressure GPs are under? We only know how many children are being treated for mental health problems if they end up in hospital — far too late.

We do have estimates of immigration from Romania and Bulgaria — created by asking around 70 people where they came from as they walked through the airport.

We don’t collect figures on food banks, so we have no reliable evidence to work out whether use has gone up, and if so, how fast. Food banks do collect their own data, but even they complain that this isn’t the independent, quality controlled information we expect from the Office for National Statistics.

These are just some of the things I’d be blamed for if I was Prime Minister - but I wouldn’t even know if the critics had a point.

Factchecking can be bewildering, but never more so than when you realise what we don’t know. For most people, even finding the time to check what politicians is saying is impossible - let alone working out what to do when the information isn’t up to scratch.

Not that my hypothetical predecessors have always helped. The Treasury recently combined the brilliant idea of sending everyone a letter explaining how our income taxes are spent with the terrible idea of categorising the pensions of teachers and doctors as part of the welfare budget and ignoring all the other taxes we pay.

Ponder this: MPs were told it would cost an extra £14m to get reliable crime figures for every police force. That’s less than one tenth of one per cent of what we spend on the police. We can either pay it, or continue to invest in ignorance.

On May the 8th the task of assessing the government’s effect on the world begins again. If the man behind the number on the black door wants to master his political fate, he should master the information flow first. If I were Prime Minister, I’d use numbers more but talk about them less.