Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We are weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.

Why are data so important in determining how we live?

Not an unfamiliar theme for our loyal listeners, but more specifically, why are good data so

important to policymakers whether they know it or not?

I've been talking to someone with a lot of experience in digging out useful information

for politicians, British ones at least.

Georgina Sturge is a statistician at the House of Commons Library in London, there to

give members of the UK Parliament information on all sorts of matters that are under debate.

And she's just written a book about it all, called Bad Data.

How governments, politicians and the rest of us get misled by numbers.

We're an in-house service to all of the MPs, there's 650 of them and all of their staff.

There's kind of like a pool of researchers, we're almost like a civil service to Parliament.

So we're all impartial in what we do and we work for politicians of all parties.

And we are there to provide expert analysis and information on all kinds of policy matters

that are being debated.

So how did it come to writing a book called Bad Data?

It was partly inspired by the work that I've done for the Library because MPs and their

staff will come to me with questions on everything.

You name it really, it could be about population, the economy, it could be about dogs or bananas,

really anything under the sun.

And what struck me in doing this work is that there are some areas where you wouldn't

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