A failure to grasp first principles

If you spent a year or so calling into your local coffee shop, paying £2 for your decaffeinated yak’s milk-infused frappuccino and was suddenly presented with a bill for £4 for the same item, you’d quickly notice the change in price.

Similarly, if you had grown accustomed to paying – say – £7 per linear metre for one metre deep trench and then you receive a bid price of £2 this would set your estimator nerves a’tingling.

Human beings quickly grow accustomed to a certain set of parameters and any straying from those parameters is as in-built as the fight or flight response to danger. The default reaction to a sudden and unexpected increase or decrease in a set of familiar figures is based upon experience.

Which makes the Government’s recent announcement of incorrect construction growth figures all the more worrying as it suggests that the bean counters dealing with the data have little or no concept of the subject matter. (Although conspiracy theorists might argue that the mistake was merely an embattled Government seeking a rare if somewhat short-lived positive headline).

As one of the UK’s leading provider of statistics and market data for the construction industry, I fail to see just how such a mistake was made in the first place, or how it managed to percolate through the countless layers of highly-paid, taxpayer-funded analysts, officials, managers and PR types before landing on the desks of incredulous news agencies up and down the country.

Obviously, like The Builders’ Conference, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) would have used colossal computer power to generate the figures in the first place. Computers are a constant source of modern day annoyance but, if there’s one thing they do well, it is number crunching. But that, apparently, is where the ONS and The Builders’ Conference systems start to differ.

All statistical analysis produced and generated by The Builders’ Conference is checked, double-checked and verified by a team of experienced individuals with the background knowledge to look beyond the figures and into how those figures were generated. Based on what we saw last week, the ONS mainframe is linked directly to the desk of a junior public relations person whose sole job is to hit the send button that transmits statistical data – unchecked and untouched by human hands – to a set of media news desks across the land.

The fact that the Office of National Statistics – which, as the name suggest, is responsible for this country’s statistical data gathering and analysis – could make such an almighty cock-up in the face of several years’ information to the contrary beggar’s belief and I sincerely hope that measures have now been put in place to ensure that this mistake is not repeated.