Bad Data by Georgina Sturge review – figures of derision

A parliamentary statistician lays bare the use and abuse of numbers in public life

When is a £50bn fiscal black hole not a £50bn fiscal black hole? More often than you might think, according to a new book about government data that will leave readers with renewed cynicism about every statistic that comes out of a politician’s mouth.

Its author, Georgina Sturge, is a statistician at the House of Commons library. She has not set out here to expose attempts by rogue actors to bamboozle us deliberately with figures – although there are plenty of them. Instead, even more alarmingly, Bad Data explains how the ways in which we count, measure and record things are very often just not fit for purpose. How, for example, could Keir Starmer claim, in 2020, that there were 600,000 more children living in poverty than at the end of the last Labour government but Boris Johnson say there were 100,000 fewer? “These claims were both supported by the government’s official figures,” Sturge says.

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