From FT.com June 12, 2013

George Osborne’s attempt to flatter the official headline measures of the public finances came unstuck on Wednesday after the UK Statistics Authority reprimanded the Office for National Statistics for treating the Treasury’s raid on the Bank of England as equivalent to tax revenues.

Upholding a complaint from the Financial Times about the ONS decision, the statistics watchdog called for a review of the headline measures of public borrowing and debt.

The decision will stop the chancellor from claiming borrowing is lower merely because funds have been moved from one part of the public sector to another, and demonstrates that the UKSA is willing to criticise the statistical work of its own government department as well as ministers.In November, Mr Osborne announced he would repatriate to the Treasury the funds building up under the quantitative easing scheme in the Bank of England arising from interest payments on the debt owned by the bank.

The Treasury hoped this raid would improve headline figures of government borrowing, helping Mr Osborne to meet his fiscal rules and say borrowing was falling, despite the weak economy.

Initially the ONS agreed with the Treasury’s arguments, but this has now been overturned by the UKSA, which said the counter arguments made by the FT were “more persuasive”.

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Posted in Data, Data Points |
From FT.com May 5, 2013

HSE data show more tower cranes have been erected in London since 2010 than in the rest of the UK combined

With Britain’s economy bumping along the bottom and official data prone to large revisions, analysts have been on the lookout for indicators of regional and national recovery.

Until now, no one spotted a good set of figures, quietly collated at the Health and Safety Executive. Cranes puncturing the skyline are the most visible indicator of economic dynamism and have often been used to gauge the heat in economies as diverse as Dubai or China and the torpor of Tokyo.

The HSE started requiring the operators of tower cranes – used for new office buildings, infrastructure, larger residential blocks and big public sector projects – to register their addresses in 2010, providing an invaluable snapshot of the building industry in action.

The results show a remarkable degree of concentration in London and its surrounding counties, signifying a gulf between the optimism about a prosperous future for the capital and pessimism in the rest of the UK.

With London home to only one in eight people in the UK, it has seen more tower cranes notified to the HSE than all the rest of the UK put together. Almost eight in 10 cranes were in London, the southeast and the east of England.

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Posted in Data |
From Money Supply December 11, 2012

When the Office for National Statistics relaunched its website last year, a geek like me was distraught as it had failed to make navigation of the UK’s generally wonderful statistics easier. “The new ONS website – aaaargh,” I commented.

Today, I gave evidence on the communication of statistics to the Public Administration Select Committee and to test whether the website had improved materially I thought I would pick a relevant question, to which I wanted to find an answer as a member of the public and as an expert user of the website. The question was: Is unemployment higher or lower now than in 1995?

This is the website journey (for lay and expert users) I described in the Committee, which I think is accurate and depressing. I don’t think a non-expert could find the interesting answer (at the bottom of the post) and an expert has to take a long journey to get there.

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Posted in UK |
From FT.com September 18, 2012

No one should be under any doubt. Jill Matheson, the national statistician, is consulting on changing the mathematical formula underpinning the venerable retail price index because the Office for National Statistics wants it changed. Consultations are not launched when experts think the status quo is fine.

At the heart of the issue is the realisation that the RPI formula is deficient and out-of-date. Continuing with the current method is the equivalent of Britain still thinking a 1970s Austin Allegro is cool, while the rest of the world is driving the latest Mini. Read more

Posted in Economics, Statistics, UK |

Chris Giles The UK’s short and shallow recession

September 7, 2012 4:00 pm by Chris Giles

There is a chart regarding the UK economy which has become so ubiquitous it is known in our office simply as “the Niesr chart”, because it is often republished by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It is supposed to be a clear and concise account of Britain’s recent economic woes, putting the recession into accurate context of past recessions. It shows the current recession as the longest and nearly the deepest since the start of the 1930s. People don’t generally know that in the UK the 1920s recession was much worse, but I’ll leave that for now.

Here is the latest version of “the Niesr chart”, published today. Take a good look at it before I tell you why I have begun to become irritated by it.

It is arresting because it does most things right. It is simple to understand. It is clearly drawn and obviously in context. The problem is that that the Niesr chart might be showing us irrelevant nonsense. It is also not a sufficient description of the UK’s recession.

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Posted in UK |
From FT.com: Chris Giles August 8, 2012

Britain’s traditional measure of inflation, the retail price index, is broken and needs fixing. The error goes back decades, has cost taxpayers billions, is still costing the exchequer about £1bn a year and has resulted in the rise in living standards being underestimated. Few errors in statistical compilation are quite this serious.

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Posted in Damned lies and statistics, Economics, UK |
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