Thank you for downloading this week's more or less podcast. Here's Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to more or less the top gear of radio for programs about numbers.

This week the National Secular Society and the Catholic Church

clash over how many Catholics regularly go to mass and we ask whether a 28-year-old woman

should be able to run a half marathon faster than a 52-year-old man.

More importantly, are your trousers lying to you?

Just stay in naturally here.

See if I, if I relax, it's 36, but for me then we can get to 35.

Yeah, but you're going to need a 36.

But first, on Tuesday the Office for National Statistics published their monthly economic and

labour market review. Bear with me this is about to get interesting because it's all about that

age-old statistical question who's more hard done by and underpaid, private sector workers

or public sector workers. The ONS review contains a chapter which tries to answer that question.

Its first paragraph says,

Some commentators have argued that taking account of pensions as well as pay,

public sector employees in the UK receive better remuneration than their counterparts in the private

sector. This article analyzes the evidence from the annual survey of hours and earnings of

the Office for National Statistics and finds that the answers are more complex than such claims

suggest. Predictably perhaps given these straight in times, the report triggered a wave of

headlines and comments such as this from the Daily Telegraph. Myth of the underpaid public sector

worker. And this from the Daily Mail. The calculation will pile pressure on the coalition to

rein in the cost of the public sector, fattened by 13 years of labour government through pay freezes,

...