Home Office caught out over immigration statistics

Good spot from three line whip

Well, well: the statistical chickens are coming home to roost for a government that has long played fast and loose with official figures.

The Home Office apologised for interfering with immigration figures

The Home Office has been forced to say sorry for seeking to interfere in the way immigration figures were released recently.

It seems old habits die hard. In order to inject some credibility into official figures, the Government agreed that they should all be issued by a new arm's length body under the auspices of the new UK Statistics Authority.

But when immigration figures were published last week, the Home Office sent an official along to the Office for National Statistics briefing to hand out a press release that gave a distinctly unbalanced take on the subject.

The Home Office decided that the subject of greatest importance was a decline in the number of eastern Europeans coming to the UK, a line that was apparently followed up by at least one national newspaper.

Now, Prof David Hand, the head of the Royal Statistical Society, has complained that this "succeeded in partially diverting some journalists' attention away from the comprehensive range of data being presented towards one specific issue".

In truth, it should not have had this effect because any journalist following immigration and crime figures over the years have known to take any Home Office press notice with a pinch of salt.

They are always selective with their use of the statistics in order to cast the government in a positive light. That is why public faith in official figures has plummeted over the years.

As Prof Hand says in a letter to Sir Michal Scholar, head of the UK Statistics Authority: "The whole incident epitomises some of the bad practices that have helped to undermine public confidence in official statistics.... At worst this can help to 'bury' news perceived as unfavourable to the Government."

When you think of the vast sums of our money spent by the Government we at least have a basic right to know, without any statistical jiggery pokery, what we are getting for it.

Yet finding the truth, or anything like it, is often impossible because yardsticks are changed, goalposts moved, timescales altered, benchmarks lowered - all to make failure as difficult to discern as possible.

On the positive side, however, we appear to be seeing that rare creature: a state regulator with teeth. Previously, there was a Statistics Commission that was meant to keep an eye on all this but it was powerless to stop the abuse.

The head of the new statutory authority, Sir Michael Scholar, is a former permanent secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry. In an interview with this newspaper, he likened the creation of the authority to Gordon Brown's decision to give independence to the Bank of England in 1997. "Good statistics are as important as sound money or clean water," he said.

Maybe the Home Office and other departments have now got the message.