How to create your very own storm in a teacup

This is a piece I wrote in around November last year about the way papers use figures to create an impression that is not necessarily correct. I love this kind of analysis of tabloid stories, before believing these financial stories they should be subjected to this kind of scrutiny. The additional research took me 15 minutes on my laptop and a calculator.

The tricks of the trade revealed!

You will need:

• One pithy headline along the lines of: ‘NHS waste slashers waste £1m on treats’; ‘£5k on puddle piddle’; or something pithier like ‘You Wasters’ (Sun 11/10/10).
• One set of numbers along the lines of: (insert interchangeable public body) spent x on y in just z months! (The exclamation mark is crucial).
• One explanation as to why aforesaid interchangeable public body is full of thieving bureaucrat bastards who should be sacked for squandering our hard-earned tax money on y.
• One hack journalist to put all this bile together (easy really isn’t it).

This is the oldest tabloid ploy in the book and one that has been used ad infinitum recently by the press; stories about government profligacy sell almost as many papers as Jordan’s new boob job. What the papers are relying on here is people’s general inability to conceive of relative levels of finance. The hope is the readers’ thoughts will run thusly: ‘£5k is a lot of money to me, therefore an organisation spending this much money on something in which I do not immediately perceive merit must be a waste’. What this doesn’t take into account is the overall budget of the Quango/council/space program in question and much of this scandal mongering would simply fall apart if subjected to closer scrutiny. Take for example the accusation that the ‘NHS waste slashers waste £1m on treats’ referring to the Commissioning Support for London body (CSL). In fact the receptions and conferences decried in the article were necessary spending. The article in question provides an example of a delegation of health department officials visiting from Singapore, for ‘exchange of information’. The Singapore health service is being used as a model by the government for NHS reform. Furthermore, the £1m should be considered in the context of a total budget of £28,856,000. It accounts for 3.24 per cent of its overall budget, small fries really.

Next, to the claim in the same article that the NHS spent £274m on ‘spin doctors’ (the non-tabloid translation of this is Management Consultant, and the raison d’etre of these people is potentially explained by exactly this kind of nasty article about the NHS). This may or may not be money well spent but the annual budget of the NHS for 2009/10 was £110bn making this expenditure 0.24 per cent of the annual budget; perhaps too high, but hardly scandalous. And finally, on to my favourite of the lot: the photograph of the puddle. There is no cryptic wordplay involved here, it is, as the saying goes, what it says on the tin: a very artistic picture of a puddle. The photograph of the puddle cost £5,000 of a total budget for The Government Art Collection of £551,000; a ratio of 0.9 to the body’s total budget. This is my favourite because of the dismissive ‘well this is crap’ attitude on which the piece relies. The phrase ‘one man’s junk…’ springs to mind. Characterising all of this as frivolous spending is what the tabloids, particularly the Sun, from which all of these examples are taken, make their money on. To return to my initial argument about merit perception this is an exquisite case of this kind of subjective mentality at work. The photograph of the puddle may or may not represent the work of a tortured soul destined to be the next Andy Warhol; however, what does the Sun intend that the Government Arts Collection agency do if not purchase art? Even if this is an unnecessary government department it has to carry out its function.

I hope this article has shown, as it was intended to, that thought, and a little number-crunching, can reduce this kind of ridiculous article to its dubious component parts. What may on the surface seem like a pointless spending choice can often on closer inspection prove to be a necessary function of a public sector body. Hospitality and conference events allow bodies to network and in the case of the CSL (above) they allowed the body to conduct important research into different healthcare models, allowing the execution of the primary function of the agency. This is not then, wasteful spending. As for the other examples, perhaps these are not the best examples of government spending, but context is everything. As a fraction of total spending these units are not the luxuries they might appear to be. The reliance on a narrow inability to see the difference between average household expenditure and the budget of a government agency is what makes these stories work. There is a reason why none of these articles reveal the percentage of overall expenditure for which the items accounted: it is not a very impressive statistic.