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Hello and welcome to more or less your indefatigable guide to the numbers all around us in the news

and in life, I'm Tim Halford. This week, a poca-liptic numbers are being reported regarding

the post-Brexit trading scene, but do they really tell us what's happening at Dover and

Folkston? Full fact on the data we need and all too often the data we haven't bothered to collect.

Ministers are tweeting reassuring numbers about flammable cladding on high-rise buildings,

forgive us if we aren't entirely suved. If you assembled all the coronavirus particles in the

world into a pile, how big would it be? And is it really true that one in five people are disabled?

So first, on Sunday, the observer reported,

Fury at Gove as exports to EU slashed by 68% since Brexit.

The paper said that exports going through British ports to the EU in January were 68% lower than

January last year. The observer said the figure came from a survey of the international members of

the Road Hall of Association. That's the Trade Association for Road Hallias, the people who

drive lorries up down in and out of the country. 68% is a big number, so we phoned the Road Hallias

Association with some questions. They told us that the number came from a survey of their members

who work with imports and exports. The aim of their survey was to take a snapshot of the

experiences of their members in January, post-Brexit, compared to last year. They did this

research in the last week of January and they asked them how many trips from the UK to the EU,

their company had made in the past seven days, and specifically to focus on trips where they

were carrying goods rather than just moving an empty lorry around. Then they also asked them how

many loaded trips they made from the UK to Europe on a typical week in 2020, although the words

typical week and 2020 are not often to be found in the same sentence. When they compared the

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