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Hello and welcome to more or less with me Tim Harford.

We have a veritable Valentine's Day massacre of sketchy statistics ahead of us.

Are foreign students crowding domestic students out of English universities?

What do the numbers tell us about social housing?

And we'll wrap it all up with the traditional Friday night treat.

Shark and Chips.

But before all that, last week, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trot

went on Radio 4's PM programme to react to Labour's abandonment of its 28 billion pound green investment pledge. During the interview, PM

presenter Evan Davis asked her about the government's future plans for borrowing and how that

would affect levels of government debt.

Debt is, after all, one of the government's main concerns.

One of Rishisunak's five pledges is to get it falling.

In fact, the government has a so-called fiscal rule to make sure this happens.

Well, sort of, hold that thought.

But the conversation was slightly derailed by a disagreement over what's projected to happen to government debt over the next five years.

Now on the latest projections, the latest official projections, debt is rising.

Let's just be quite clear, debt goes up over the next few years it's higher in four years

than it is now it's not going to change that much in the next the next projection

you'll get at the budget what is puzzling me is how you can be even talking about tax cuts when a central

pledge is getting debt down and debt is going up.

So the central pledge is one of our fiscal rules which is that debt needs to be

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