Trust me – I'm a statistician

Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, is campaigning to purify government statistics. He has warned party leaders he will be scrutinising their handling of figures to ensure that they are impartial during the election campaign. Since the watchdog was established in April 2008, Scholar has accused the government of releasing selective figures on knife crime and exaggerating the gender pay gap, but his vision goes beyond issuing reprimands to politicians. Instead he aspires to oversee a broader reform of how politicians interpret figures. "Recent surveys have shown that public confidence in official statistics is low and there is a perception that official statistics are subject to political interference," he told party leaders last week. Paying tribute to the work of the government statistics office, he stresses that this is a "highly professional and independent" but warns that there is a popular belief that they are leant upon by their political masters, partly because senior politicians are given access to the figures 24 hours before they are released to the public. "The perception that a small clique of people are entrusted with these figures first is very damaging to public confidence in statistics," he argues.Statistics have always been subject to political interference and Scholar points out that between 1980 and 1991 the definition of unemployment was altered more than 20 times and each time the unemployment figure shrank. "There have been times when ­ministers have intervened and said: 'We don't want that figure released, it is embarrassing'. Since we have been in business they can't do that any more," he said."Under the statute that set us up, I am responsible for safeguarding the production of all official statistics," he says. "We are here to keep things clean." It is not an easy mission, because of the complexity of the data he is scrutinising. "A statistic is not like a score at a football match, where you count how many goals," he says.