Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

It's 10 years since the Home Office published their consultation on what became known as "ID cards", Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud – A Consultation Paper. Crucial to the system was the belief that all 60 million of us in the UK could be identified by various biometrics, specifically facial geometry and flat print fingerprints.

Utter cockpoppy, the technology's simply not up to it. But the choice had been made. By December 2010, when the Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed, the Home Office confessed to £292 million of our money having been wasted on the scheme, with nothing to show for it.

The waste goes on. We're wasting money on biometrics in Sarah Rapson's ePassports. We're wasting money on Jackie Keane's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System. That takes in eGates that don't work at UK airports and UK visa application checking systems that don't work all over the world. As part of Project Lantern, the police are deploying mobile fingerprinting equipment that doesn't work. And DWP are threatening to use voice biometrics that don't work for their new Universal Credit system.

It goes on because of one wrong choice made 10 years ago. The reliability of the products wasn't checked properly and adverse evidence was ignored. Typical headstrong proletarian behaviour, no idea what's in anyone's best interests, naïve consumers, too much money burning a hole in their pocket, just buy it because it looks good on TV and sounds modern.

How can you help?

You can write to ministers and their officials. That doesn't help. You can write magazine articles and letters to newspapers and comments on blogs and you can write your own blog. You can speak at public meetings and on the radio. That doesn't help. You can have meetings at the Home Office and ditto. You can respond to government consultations and attend government briefings. Fat lot of good it'll do you. You can write to your MP. He or she will get an answer for you. But it won't help. Whitehall wants biometrics and Whitehall's jolly well going to have biometrics, never mind if they don't work.

So then you have another idea. Get reinforcements. Call on organisations that have institutional power.

When the Home Office start advertising their misbegotten ID cards scheme and making unrealistic claims for the reliability of today's mass consumer biometrics, you report them to the Advertising Standards Authority. Brilliant. Except that there's nothing the ASA can do in this case.

So then you submit a freedom of information request asking what justification the Home Office have for investing public money in expensive systems which depend for their success on biometrics being reliable which they aren't and the Home Office know that perfectly well and therefore know that all or some of our money will be wasted. 2½ years later, thanks to the First-Tier Tribunal (Information Rights), you're 2½ years older and none the wiser, Whitehall continue bone-headedly against all the evidence to waste our money on biometrics.

Then Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, makes an important point:

One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate.

Honest political debate? Maybe the UKSA can help. Maybe if they or the Office for National Statistics said that the biometrics technology being considered is not reliable enough, then the Home Office would stop wasting our money? No good. The UKSA can only comment on official statistics. And the statistics adduced from the UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial aren't official.

This attempt to help the Home Office to make evidence-based policy and to face up to their mistake – choosing to rely on flaky biometrics – clearly goes back years. Lots of effort. No results. The fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate still eludes us.

And then Andrew Watson succeeds through a freedom of information request in getting the National Policing Improvement Agency's own internal report on mobile fingerprinting equipment published.

The report is full of statistics, it's marked "Restricted-Commercial", it's got Northrop Grumman's logo on it and it's been prepared for the Police Information Technology Organisation (the old name for the National Policing improvement Agency). Official, or what?

By this stage, Sir Michael Scholar has been replaced by Andrew Dilnot as chair of the UKSA. Can Mr Dilnot comment on the reliability of mass consumer biometrics? No. The statistics still aren't official enough:

From: xxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of authority enquiries Sent: 01 August 2012 23:19 To: 'David Moss' Subject: Re: Misleading use by the Home Office and others of statistics associated with biometrics Dear Mr Moss Thank you for your email to Andrew Dilnot regarding biometric information. I am replying on Andrew's behalf. We have considered this matter in discussion with David Blunt, the Head of Profession for Statistics at the Home Office. We share Mr Blunt's view that the studies to which you refer are not official statistics, and we understand from the Home Office that there are no current plans for official statistics in this area to be produced. As you will be aware from our earlier replies, the Authority's statutory remit covers official statistics as set out in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Our view therefore is that this remains a matter about which we would continue to encourage you to maintain a dialogue with relevant Home Office officials directly. We understand that you attended a meeting with Home Office officials in spring 2010 and, following further correspondence, you received a reply from the National Policing Improvement Agency in June 2010 regarding the specifics of the issues that concerned you. I am sorry that we are unable to assist you further at the present time. Kind regards xxxxxxxxxx Private Secretary to Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority

UK Border Force staff are laid off in the expectation that they can be replaced by biometric technology, then the queues at the airport get too long because the technology doesn't work and the staff have to be re-hired, but still Whitehall remains incapable of justifying its investment of public money in biometric technology which is too unreliable to do the jobs demanded of it. Incapable and unwilling.

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices. And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 1

Time was when Sir Michael Scholar was the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) and he said, among other things:

“One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate ...”

You may want to tweak Sir Michael's point a bit. You may prefer to say that there are many fundamental materials, not just "good statistics", whatever "good" means. But if you're interested in honest political debate it's hard to gainsay him, Sir Michael is onto something.

Now he has passed the baton, and it is Andrew Dilnot who is chairman of the UKSA and who leads the Government Statistical Service and thus the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Mr Dilnot has investigated the problem of social care for the elderly and recommended to the government that there should be a cap of £35,000 on the amount anyone is expected to pay for their care. Thereafter, the government should pay for it, he says, even if the elderly person has assets of their own, such as a house which could be sold to pay for their care.

It is impossible now in the UK to get insurance cover for social care in your old age. Mr Dilnot recently described that to the BBC as a "market failure". He's wrong, isn't he? If the market values your house at £350,000, say, then thanks to the market you can afford about 100 months in a decent old people's home. The market has not failed and Mr Dilnot is wrong to say that it has.

In the same BBC interview, Mr Dilnot describes the state stepping in and taking over the payment of your social care as you "taking control of your life". Surely it's the opposite. It's the state taking control.

The cost of implementing Mr Dilnot's £35,000 cap is estimated – very possibly by the ONS – to be £750 million p.a. That is just over one one-thousandth of current public expenditure ("one per mil" or "1‰") and so, Mr Dilnot says, his plan should be adopted as government policy.

An annual contribution of £750 million to the DMossEsq executive pension plan would also represent only about 1‰ of public expenditure. Is that a reason to make such a contribution?

It's all very well chatting about what individuals can afford but there are other questions:

• How much can the state afford?
• Public spending in the UK stands at about £700 billion p.a. at the moment, of which about £150 billion is borrowed. Is it sustainable to continue increasing the tax burden and the level of borrowing? How long can we go on printing money, through quantitative easing or any other technique? What happens to inflation? And interest rates? And exchange rates?
• With our £2 trillion national debt*, aren't we supposed to be looking for ways to cut public spending, and not increase it? When do we have to confront reality?
• If we can raise another £750 million in tax, or borrow it, why spend it on social care for the elderly who own a house? Why not eye care? Or dental care? Or subsidised taxies? Why not reduce the excise duty on tobacco?
• Why spend the money on a problem that doesn't need solving? People just need to sell their house and then they're in funds. Why not try to solve a real problem?
• Is social care for the elderly who can afford to pay for it themselves a legitimate matter for the state to involve itself in? If so, is there any limit to state involvement?
• Could the budget on some other less vital public services be cut by £750 million to pay for Mr Dilnot's dream?
• The standards of some care homes for the elderly are exemplary and in other cases the standards fall below the level we expect of a zoo. How does Mr Dilnot propose to ensure that public funds will provide dignified care and not sub-zoo care?
• Mr Dilnot considers individuals on the one hand and the state on the other. That doesn't exhaust the cast of actors in this play. Among others, there are families in between. Are families avoiding their responsibilities? Is the problem of social care for the elderly a failure of families? What does Mr Dilnot propose to do about that?

He doesn't burden the BBC with any of these questions. Or any answers to them.

With Mr Dilnot now in charge, the water is just a little cloudier and the air just a little less Swiss – what price "honest political debate" in the UK?

----------

* The Times, 27 August 2012, Confusion reigns over the state of British debt:

A poll for the Centre for Policy Studies found that far more people wrongly believed that the coalition intended to cut debt over the next few years than correctly believed that it expected to increase it ... While planning to bring down the annual deficit — the difference between what the Government spends and the money it receives and the amount of extra borrowing it incurs each year — the coalition nevertheless expects to lift total government debt by £600 billion between 2010 and 2015 ... Total government debt is £1.03 trillion, equivalent to 65.7 per cent of Britain’s total national output. Add in liabilities kept off the balance sheet and it doubles to more than £2 trillion ...

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 1

Time was when Sir Michael Scholar was the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) and he said, among other things:

“One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate ...”

You may want to tweak Sir Michael's point a bit. You may prefer to say that there are many fundamental materials, not just "good statistics", whatever "good" means. But if you're interested in honest political debate it's hard to gainsay him, Sir Michael is onto something.

Protecting civilisation from the fingers of terror

Here's a quotation from an article in New Scientist magazine. You need to know that Visionics is a biometrics company that specialises in face recognition. Now you're an expert:

Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

Admitted ... the police admitted ...

Clearly, the Newham police, for all sorts of human reasons, somehow entrapped themselves in a deception perpetrated on the public at public expense. Has it happened again?

Last week, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley was singing the praises of the mobile fingerprint readers now issued to policemen patrolling in 28 of the UK's 56 police forces. Home Office figures suggest that the flat print fingerprint technology used in these devices fails about 20% of the time.

Equally clearly, and to the credit of the Newham police, they finally extricated themselves from this fraud with their admission. Will that happen again?

How long before we read in New Scientist that:

... Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley admitted to __________ that the MobileID initiative had never even matched the fingerprints of a person on the street to a set of dabs in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest. In fact all it had achieved was to reduce the chances of a felon being taken down to the nick by a straight 20% at a stroke.

For anyone interested in the history of biometrics companies, i.e. how we got into this mess, please note that:

• After the Newham debacle Visionics was taken over by Identix.
• Identix supplied the biometrics technology for the UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial from which the 20% failure rate for flat print fingerprinting is taken.
• Identix was taken over by L-1 Identity Solutions.
• L-1 was bought by Safran.
• And Safran provide the biometrics we depend on for the success of IABS, the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System which is meant to keep the UK border secure and to make the 2012 Olympics safe.

Please note also that the New Scientist article quoted above appeared in the 7 September 2002 issue of the magazine, nearly 10 years ago. The article is so full of important observations of mendacity, opportunism and technological incompetence still relevant today that it is further quoted with grateful acknowledgement below:

Face-off I CAME here looking for an argument but I can't find one. All round this lofty exhibition hall - billed as the world's biggest market for security equipment - the people selling face-recognition systems are being disarmingly, infuriatingly honest ... I thought they'd at least attempt to defend the technology. When they don't, it's me who's caught off guard. Is it true that the systems can't recognise someone wearing sunglasses? Yes, they say. Is it true that if you turn your head and look to one side of the camera, it can't pick you out? Again, yes. What about if you simply don't keep your head still? They nod. Maybe nine or ten months ago they would have risen to the bait. In those days the face-recognition industry was on a high. In the wake of 11 September, Visionics, a leading manufacturer, issued a fact sheet explaining how its technology could enhance airport security. They called it "Protecting civilization from the faces of terror". The company's share price skyrocketed, as did the stocks of other face-recognition companies, and airports across the globe began installing the software and running trials. As the results start to come in, however, the gloss is wearing off. No matter what you might have heard about face-recognition software, Big Brother it ain't ... Image Metrics, a British company that develops image-recognition software, ... warned of the danger of exaggerated claims, saying that "an ineffective or poorly applied security technology is as dangerous as a poorly tested or inappropriately prescribed drug" ... to catch 90 per cent of suspects at an airport, face-recognition software would have to raise a huge number of false alarms. One in three people would end up being dragged out of the line - and that's assuming everyone looks straight at the camera and makes no effort to disguise themselves ... Palm Beach International Airport in Florida released the initial results of a trial using a Visionics face-recognition system. The airport authorities loaded the system with photographs of 250 people, 15 of whom were airport employees. The idea was that the system would recognise these employees every time they passed in front of a camera. But, the airport authorities admitted, the system only recognised the volunteers 47 per cent of the time while raising two or three false alarms per hour ... To give themselves the best chance of picking up suspects, operators can set the software so that it doesn't have to make an exact match before it raises the alarm. But there's a price to pay: the more potential suspects you pick up, the more false alarms you get. You have to get the balance just right. Visionics - now called Identix after merging with a fingerprint-scanning company in June - is quick to blame its system's lacklustre performance on operators getting these settings wrong ... Numerous studies have shown that people are surprisingly bad at matching photos to real faces. A 1997 experiment to investigate the value of photo IDs on credit cards concluded that cashiers were unable to tell whether or not photographs matched the faces of the people holding them. The test, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (vol 11, p 211), found that around 66 per cent of cashiers wrongly rejected a transaction and more than 50 per cent accepted a transaction they should have turned down. The report concluded that people's ability to match faces to photographs was so poor that introducing photo IDs on credit cards could actually increase fraud. The way people change as they age could also be a problem. A study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology investigated what happens when a face-recognition system tries to match up two sets of mugshots taken 18 months apart. It failed dismally, with a success rate of only 57 per cent. There's another fundamental problem with using face-recognition software to spot terrorists: good pictures of suspects are hard to come by ... Very few security personnel at American airports have CIA clearance, so they aren't allowed to see the images. "Until they've got cleared personnel in each of those airports they can't stop terrorists getting on planes," says Iain Drummond, chief executive of Imagis technologies, a biometrics company based in Vancouver, Canada ... Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

There are more of these gems available in the DMossEsq treasure trove of mendacity, Biometrics: guilty until proven innocent.

Look at the Image Metrics quotation above, "an ineffective or poorly applied security technology is as dangerous as a poorly tested or inappropriately prescribed drug". Prescription drugs are subject to extensive testing before the regulators will sanction their release to the public. Without that, we'd all be dead. The same goes for aircraft design. Without the Civil Aviation Authority, a lot more of us would be dead.

There is none of that open, public, peer-reviewed testing regime when it comes to the government wasting our money on biometrics. Try to find out what justification there is for Whitehall's decision to invest in biometrics and you get a two-year court case and no information.

There is no good reason for this peculiar asymmetry.

How do we avoid the recurrence of Newham-style embarrassments?

It's about time the Office for National Statistics was involved in Whitehall technology decisions and that initiatives which depend on reliable technology should not be allowed to incur substantial public expenditure before and unless the ONS has agreed and published official statistics supporting the business case.

Protecting civilisation from the fingers of terror

Here's a quotation from an article in New Scientist magazine. You need to know that Visionics is a biometrics company that specialises in face recognition. Now you're an expert:

Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

Admitted ... the police admitted ...

Clearly, the Newham police, for all sorts of human reasons, somehow entrapped themselves in a deception perpetrated on the public at public expense. Has it happened again?

Last week, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley was singing the praises of the mobile fingerprint readers now issued to policemen patrolling in 28 of the UK's 56 police forces. Home Office figures suggest that the flat print fingerprint technology used in these devices fails about 20% of the time.

Equally clearly, and to the credit of the Newham police, they finally extricated themselves from this fraud with their admission. Will that happen again?

How long before we read in New Scientist that:

... Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley admitted to __________ that the MobileID initiative had never even matched the fingerprints of a person on the street to a set of dabs in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest. In fact all it had achieved was to reduce the chances of a felon being taken down to the nick by a straight 20% at a stroke.

WrinklesInTheMatrix: Boris Johnson 1

Telegraph, 21 October 2011:

Boris Johnson rebuked over use of dodgy statistics Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has been rebuked by the head of Britain’s statistics watchdog for repeatedly using questionable figures to overstate his claims of cutting reoffending rates. Sir Michael Scholar, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, which scrutinises all official figures, singled out some of Mr Johnson’s comments to the Home Affairs Select Committee last month ...

Guardian, 16 November 2011:

Boris Johnson says UK Statistics Authority chair is 'Labour stooge' Boris Johnson has accused the chair of the UK Statistics Authority of being a "Labour stooge". The London mayor's attack came after he was put on the rack over misleading statistics he had given to a Commons committee to highlight the success of an initiative to cut crime ...

Now here's a wrinkle – three of them, actually:

• Statistics are pre-party political, they don't "know" about Labour and Conservative
• If doctors used statistics the way politicians do, we'd all be dead
• Sir Michael was Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher 1981-83

Sir Michael is a Good Thing. Boris please note, Sir Michael says:

... having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate.

WrinklesInTheMatrix: Boris Johnson 1

Telegraph, 21 October 2011:

Boris Johnson rebuked over use of dodgy statistics Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has been rebuked by the head of Britain’s statistics watchdog for repeatedly using questionable figures to overstate his claims of cutting reoffending rates. Sir Michael Scholar, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, which scrutinises all official figures, singled out some of Mr Johnson’s comments to the Home Affairs Select Committee last month ...

Guardian, 16 November 2011:

Boris Johnson says UK Statistics Authority chair is 'Labour stooge' Boris Johnson has accused the chair of the UK Statistics Authority of being a "Labour stooge". The London mayor's attack came after he was put on the rack over misleading statistics he had given to a Commons committee to highlight the success of an initiative to cut crime ...

Now here's a wrinkle – three of them, actually:

• Statistics are pre-party political, they don't "know" about Labour and Conservative
• If doctors used statistics the way politicians do, we'd all be dead
• Sir Michael was Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher 1981-83

Sir Michael is a Good Thing. Boris please note, Sir Michael says:

... having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate.

Whitehall waste – official statistics

From today's BBC News website:

Home Office drug seizure figures were 'highly selective' The UK Border Agency has been "highly selective" in its use of drugs seizure figures, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority has said. Sir Michael Scholar has written to the Home Office to seek reassurances that figures were not released to generate positive news coverage. He said if this was the case it would be "highly corrosive and damaging" ...

Sir Michael is Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority. He is a Good Thing.

This isn't the first time he's taken the Home Office to task over its tendentious use of statistics. Public Servant magazine carried this article back in March 2009:

Statistics show this watchdog is prepared to bare its teeth ... Government departments – notably the Home Office – are having to learn some painful lessons on the use and misuse of statistics. The Home Office has found itself in hot water a couple of times – for its fact sheet on knife crime statistics in December, and for tacking a press release on "tough border controls" onto ONS data on population figures last August.

From the same article:

Concern about declining public trust in government in general – and official statistics in particular – led ministers, with all-party support, to set up an independent watchdog in the UK Statistics Authority [chaired by Sir Michael Scholar], with a tough new code of practice for all public bodies producing any kind of official figures ... “One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate”, [says Sir Michael] ... One innovation is a national statistics publication hub website, on which all the new statistical releases are posted every day. “For the first time it completely separates the statistics from comment on them ... The new rule that data cannot be released to the media or ministers more than 24 hours before publication is also having an effect ... Does what is perceived as the selective release of the most favourable figures into friendly ears contribute to public distrust? “I think it does,” Sir Michael replies. “I personally think it’s a form of corruption” ... “… what should happen is that political debate takes place on the basis of a clean set of statistics, produced without political interference by professionals who have a clear set of values as regards the integrity, objectivity and impartiality of what they are doing” ...

Someone approached the UK Statistics Authority a few years ago and asked if they could take a look at the statistics associated with the Home Office's ID cards scheme. These statistics are so unimpressive that the project should not be allowed to proceed, said someone.

No, said the UK Statistics Authority, we can only intervene where there are official statistics. The statistics the Home Office are relying on are not official. So we can't comment.

That is one of the many problems with project management in Whitehall. That is one reason why so much public money is wasted by Whitehall. That is why someone suggested to the Home Office that they should submit themselves to the discipline of the UK Statistics Authority, see below. And that is very possibly why the Home Office have never answered that point:

I suggest that the way to overcome that scepticism is to place the matter in the hands of the Office of National Statistics. The use of mass consumer biometrics in public services, I suggest, should be based on official statistics. If rigorous academic evaluation suggests that mass consumer biometrics have a part to play, well and good. If not, then don't let's waste our time and money on them.

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22 November 2011 – one week later, the Guardian catch up:  In praise of … Sir Michael Scholar

Whitehall waste – official statistics

From today's BBC News website:

Home Office drug seizure figures were 'highly selective' The UK Border Agency has been "highly selective" in its use of drugs seizure figures, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority has said. Sir Michael Scholar has written to the Home Office to seek reassurances that figures were not released to generate positive news coverage. He said if this was the case it would be "highly corrosive and damaging" ...

Sir Michael is Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority. He is a Good Thing.