Reality Check: Britain's stats have become dangerously unreliable
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The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Britain is facing a quiet crisis — its data is breaking down, and the government’s numbers are increasingly unreliable.
In this episode of Reality Check, economics editor Michael Simmons asks what happens when the state can’t count properly. How can the Bank of England set interest rates or the Treasury balance the books when the data they rely on is wrong? And why are so many “official” statistics now being stripped of their trusted status?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, |
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| 0:22.9 | me, Michael Gove, and our assistant editor, Madeline Grant. Go to www.com.com.com.com |
| 0:30.5 | UK forward slash voucher to claim this offer now. Terms apply. Who lives in Britain? How many people are even here? |
| 0:39.2 | What do they do? What taxes do they pay? Increasingly, these basic questions go unanswered by the state. |
| 0:47.3 | Hello and welcome to reality check. Less spin, more stats. I'm Michael Simmons, the Spectators |
| 0:53.5 | Economics Editor. Now, most of you watching and listening |
| 0:58.3 | to Reality Check have lives, but if like me you don't and you spend your time going around |
| 1:05.6 | the ONS's website, a few weeks ago you've noticed an interesting correction notice on the public sector |
| 1:12.8 | finance figures. These are the figures on borrowing, on debt, the size of the deficit. But in the |
| 1:20.3 | most recent set of figures, a notice appeared from the O&S to say that an error had been found in the |
| 1:26.9 | data. And the result of that error, error had been found in the data. |
| 1:35.7 | And the result of that error, which had been caused by an underreporting in VAT tax receipts from HMRC, |
| 1:47.1 | meant that so far this year, we've actually borrowed two billion pounds less than had initially been reported by the ONS. Now, there were some cheers in the treasury about this, because as you can imagine, you know, they've got this black hole worth |
| 1:51.5 | tens of billions of pounds they've got to fill, and the O&S has found this two billion down |
| 1:57.0 | the back of the sofa for them. So great news, but actually it's just the most recent |
| 2:01.6 | example of the worrying breakdown of the quality of the data that governs Britain. It's not just |
| 2:07.4 | tax receipt data that's going wrong. I'm going to look at three different areas, different topics, |
| 2:12.7 | where we're seeing errors that are becoming more and more problematic for the government. We're going to |
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