Why The Stats Behind The Budget Might Be Wrong

With the Resolution Foundation estimating that the Office for National Statistics have over-stated the nation’s unemployment rate by 930,000 people since 2019, Robert and Steph are joined by the Chair of National Statistics Authority and former head of the OBR, Robert Chote, to discuss why data is so poor in the UK, if the foundations of our political and economic decisions are based on numbers that can’t be trusted and whether the OBR is preventing ambitious economics.

00:00 Intro
00:51 What can Labour do now they've run out of money?
05:29 Will there be spending cuts?
11:00 Unemployment
23:13 How robust is the data?
28:09 Is growth the right measurement?
39:20 Pensions
42:15 Outro

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Assistant Producer: India Dunkley, Alice Horrell
Producer: Ross Buchanan
Head of Content: Tom Whiter
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport

[radiantinred]

"It's a feature and not a bug"
Civil Service thinking at its best.

[sciencebus]

Their utterly ridiculous stats about the percentage of farms that will be smashed up by their next tax raid tells us everything we need to know about their grasp of data.

[alexshawwest]

Steph need to do a e on 101 class. Growth matters to everyone in the country. In simple terms, If the pie shrinks you get less, and your standard of living falls

[mattwright]

How about 'joining up' the northern university cities where there is also excellent research and new spin-outs with huge growth potential and a community that actually wants and needs it!!

[lorcaran]

If they can't spot a £22b black hole, are they doing a good job.

It was also supposed to be apolitical, but it very much feels like it supports the incumbent government of the time. Or bypassed when inconvenient.

[johntaylor]

Markets will act on the evidence that they see and the treasury and NGOs can't spin that. And Taxing businesses and people to oblivion is not 'reform'.

[advocate]

They need to look at synthwtic data. We are running experiments in the biggest companies in Market Research and it's proving quite solid. MR is changing at lightening speed. Clearly the ONS is not.

[Treeburnify]

Interest rates, both up and down, Bank of England has a long history of always too little, too late. Recent governments have manipulated GDP through unrestrained immigration. GDP increase from immigration has made the population and public services worse off, not better.

[JimboJimbo-ii]

Just phase out the state pension over the next 30 years

[ctrl-shift-run]

That Singapore one doesn't sound correct...

[monir]

LOL typical government. Dotn like the rules so lets just chage them. Government changes its fiscal rules will most likely spook the bond markets. How about voting in a government that actually knows what it is doing?