United Kingdom Statistics Authority

Roger Mullin Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

SNP Members welcome the appointment of Sir David, and we certainly wish him well in his future role as chair of the UK Statistics Authority. However, we have some concerns about the UK Statistics Authority’s rather narrow approach to the way in which it reviews and undertakes a critique of the statistics used by the Government and others.

Tomorrow, we will be faced with the Budget. I predict that it will have forecasts from the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, and may possibly even throw in the odd forecast from the Bank of England. One thing that will be true of every forecast produced by all those bodies is that not a single confidence interval will be mentioned. We know that their forecasts are consistent—consistently wrong and always need revision, partly because the models used are inappropriate.

I notice in the description of the UK Statistics Authority that part of its task is to make sure statistics are available to aid Government decision making, which is a very worthy purpose. I have struggled to find any expertise in, for example, Bayesian statistics that could be used as decision aids. That is possibly because the Government do not use any statistical decision aids in their decision making. I think there is a long way to go in developing the authority to provide the kind of critique that will realistically help the Government both now and in the future. For that future, however, we wish Sir David well.