Poverty
Tony Blair promised to eradicate child poverty in the UK. A couple of articles, ‘Redefining poverty will lead to ridicule, ministers told’ (The Independent 27 August 2002) and ‘Poor definition confuses poverty’ (The Daily Telegraph 27 August 2002) suggest that the government is thinking of ‘eradicating’ poverty by redefining it.
Hospital waiting lists
Reported in The Daily Telegraph,‘”Manipulated” lists not helping NHS’, on 18 September 2002, the Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that ‘at least 20 hospitals managers and staff inappropriately manipulated their waiting list data “to hide the fact that they were missing Government targets.” ‘ (And all the others who ‘hid the fact’ and weren’t detected.)
From my own recent experience, it is terribly easy to manipulate hospital waiting lists. One way is have the X-ray department, through which a large proportion of the NHS cases have to pass, drags its feet. You wait for an X-ray appointment. Weeks, months, pass. Eventually the X-ray results go back to the GP who makes an appointment to see a surgeon. Weeks, months pass. You see the surgeon who puts you on a waiting list for an operation. In my case nearly six months from needing an X-ray to seeing the surgeon for the first time – six months in which I didn’t figure on any list.
Other methods of fiddling figures and targets and promises were discussed in Philip Johnston, ‘Artful dodgers of Whitehall seethe at display of integrity’, The Daily Telegraph 25 October 2002.
Street crime
The Prime Minister promised in April to bring ‘street crime’ under control and duly announced in September. In ‘Urban crime is on the decline: but can we trust the evidence?’ (The Independent 13 September 2002) Ian Burrell showed that the ‘fall’ claimed by Home Secretary Blunkett in street crime had been achieved by the simple device of comparing the figures for April and August. In April children are at school, on the streets and get their mobile phones stolen – a significant element in ‘street crime’. In August they are on holiday and not on the streets in the same numbers. Voila! ‘Street crime’ falls.
Crime figures will be faked when the government introduces ‘league tables’ for police forces, said two anonymous police officers in ‘Targets risk ushering in fakery and civil unrest’, The Guardian 2 October 2002.
SATs
As many teachers in secondary schools know, primary school SATs, standard attainment task figures, are widely faked, sending children from primary school to secondary school with fake ‘attainment’. This then creates the ‘problem’, of pupil achievement ‘standstill’ in the first years of secondary school as the pupils catch up with their stated ‘attainment’ in primary school. This was discussed in ‘Is it any wonder that some heads are cheating?’, The Guardian 14 May 2002 and ‘Widespread cheating devalues school tests’, The Guardian 28 October 2002. One head teacher is to be charged with fraud. (The Guardian 9 November 2002).
Targets unattainable? Lower the targets!
‘Significant changes are being made to national tests for 14 year-olds to make them more accessible as schools strain to reach demanding new government targets.’ (‘”More accessible” English tests for pupils at 14’, The Guardian 8 July 2002)
‘Lessons in algebra, geometry and trigonometry, the bane of generations of bored schoolchildren are expected to be reduced in a shake-up of mathematics teaching to be announced by the government this week’. (‘Shake-up to make maths more relevant means less algebra’ The Sunday Telegraph 21 July 2002)
‘Targets to improve air quality have been lowered because achieving them would have been too difficult’, said the Environment minister Michael Meacher. (‘Targets on air quality made easier for councils’, Charles Arthur, The Independent 6 August 2002). The article also pointed out that London had lower targets than elsewhere because, said minister Meacher, ‘Putting the same limits on London as……the rest of the country would mean virtually halting the use of vehicles in the capital.’
Ambulance response times
‘Ambulance services are fiddling the response times to 999 calls’ (James Meikle, The Guardian 8 August 2002). See also ‘Ambulance “fiddles” put lives at risk’, The Guardian 16 July 2002) and ‘Ambulance staff “feared revealing fiddled 999 data”‘ in The Guardian 15 October 2002.
Doctors’ working hours
‘Hospital managers are forcing new doctors to lie about their hours of work in a effort to comply with EU rules setting a maximum of 56 hours a week ‘ (‘Junior doctors “forced to lie over working hours”‘, The Guardian 3 July 2002.)
Unemployment figures
Unemployment figures are being faked. (‘Jobless figures challenged, The Guardian 5 August 2002) ‘The ONS [Office of National Statistics] admitted that its reports of unemployment falling across the country were wrong…..the problem arose because the official definition of local unemployment relies on “travel to work areas”…In districts where large numbers of workers commute in, this has led to underestimation of jobless living locally.’ In ‘Jobless tally “is really 2.8 million”‘, in The Guardian 29 October 2002, Heather Stewart reported academic research showing that the UK’s apparently low unemployment rate is achieved by having 2 million people on the long-term sick list.
Welfare fraud figures
‘Labour ministers have persistently exaggerated welfare fraud by a minority of claimants in an attempt to distract attention from difficult questions about improving economic security for the majority’, so began ‘Benefit fraud “is exaggerated”‘ in The Guardian 28 August 2002.
Labour Party Website
In ‘Professors accuse Labour of creating a “social statistical utopia”‘ in The Guardian 8 October David Walker reported that study by a group of academics has found that The Labour Party has ‘systematically manipulated’ data on its website to show improvements in health, schooling and other services. ‘Rather than appearing to be a necessary series of occasional white lies, it is beginning to look as if the provision of this distorted picture is a longer term party strategy’, the paper says.
Blair-speak
In Tribune (11 October 2002), ‘Liar, liar: Tony Blair’s pants are on fire’, Edward Pearce recapped a piece from The Daily Mail which had sent a journalist out to Mozambique to interview the doctor whom Blair quoted in his Labour Party conference speech as saying: ‘Britain is our hope. Thanks to you we have debt relief. Thanks to you we have new programmes to fight Aids and malaria. Thanks to you the docks at Maputo are being rebuilt and we can sell out goods abroad.’ Of course whole quote had been fabricated. Interviewed by the Mail he said: ‘I never thought of Britain as a country which helps us. I think more of Holland, Denmark and Sweden who do great work here in villages where we have epidemics.’