Friday, September 10, 2010

Unreliable sources

Yet again the printed press failed to give us proper references to a scientific, statistical or official report, in a way that they would not dream of doing if they were talking about a newly published novel.

On Thursday (9 September) we had figures splashed about on the numbers of ‘families where no one works.’ – 4 million ‘according to the Office for National Statistics’ in something referred to simply as ‘the report.’

There was only one thing wrong – at least only one thing that I spotted in The Times graphic: the ‘Total number of UK households’ was given as 20.4 million, which is simply not the case; figures published earlier this year by the Department of Communities & Local Government for example put the total for England alone at 21.5 million households in 2006.

Fortunately the ONS website has become a lot easier to navigate recently & at least I was looking for something very up to date – it is still not so easy to find things which are not so currently in the news.

And so we find that ‘Estimates on the economic activity status of households are for only those households that includes at least one person aged 16 to 64’. The missing millions consist of households where all the adults are over 65.

If we were to include all those households that figure of 4 million households without a wage or salary coming in may even double – the number of over-65s who live on their own as single-person households is approaching 3 million just in England.

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