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We are your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

Our New Year's resolution is to make the world that up for our loyal

listeners and my name is Tim Harford.

If I may paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, nothing in life is certain save death, taxes and missing cats.

So death taxes and missing cats will be our topics today.

On taxes we ask whether the government is offering huge tax cuts or huge tax increases.

Kind of feels important to pin that one down. On death we look at claim and counterclaim from the COVID inquiry.

And on cats we ask whether 184 of them are going missing every minute around the UK.

Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions.

But first let's look at a claim about gun crime, which you might think is at least death adjacent, hold

that thought. An astonishing number appeared in an opinion piece in the Telegraph just after

the new year, attacking the London Mayor,

Sadiq Khan for his record on crime and pointing to...

An astonishing 2,533% rise in firearms offences according to one analysis. in the implausibly big? It certainly raised the suspicions of Gavin Hales, a police and crime researcher

and a senior associate fellow at the Police Foundation.

It didn't smell right to me for two reasons. I mean initially 2,533% is a huge increase and that very rarely happens with any sort of crime statistics

unless something very unusual has happened.

Basically they're saying it's about 25 times, 26 times higher than it used to be.

Yes, comparing one six month period with the same six month period a year later, they said that

farms' offenses had increased 25 times.

...