Evidence-based policy-making? Don’t bet on it

If you’re going to have a bet this party conference season, take on an MP – that’s the obvious conclusion from an Ipsos Mori poll for the Royal Statistical Society, which suggests that our elected representatives are simply asking to be fleeced.

As part of its Parliamentary lobbying work, the RSS set a basic probability question for nearly 100 MPs. ‘If you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?’*

More than half of them got the answer wrong.

There was a clear difference in performance between parties, with the Tories doing far better than their Labour counterparts.

Despite this, more than three-quarters of MPs said they generally felt confident when dealing with numbers. The MPs surveyed did at least recognise their colleagues’ limitations – only a quarter agreed with the statement that ‘politicians use official statistics and figures accurately when talking about their policies’. The questions were set as part of Ipsos Mori’s regular MPs poll, undertaken last winter, and the result has only just been published by the RSS.

But before representatives of the media start to sneer at this tale of statistical underperformance, it’s worth mentioning that MPs had an even worse impression of news-gatherers. Just 15 per cent of MPs felt that ‘newspapers and TV channels report statistics accurately’. Time to for the RSS to set the coin question for Fleet Street’s newsrooms, perhaps.

*The answer is 25% – but I’m assuming readers of this blog didn’t need me to tell you that…