Andrew Dilnot
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard May 2012
Andrew Dilnot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
From time to time, I have favourite pictures about numbers.
That's the kind of a person I am.
And my current favourite picture is an attempt to represent public spending.
People don't easily understand how big or little public spending is.
So I have a chart with...
697 little grey boxes on it.
697 because £697 billion is how much public spending is.
A bit more than 100 of those boxes are the National Health Service.
Nearly 100 of them are social security benefits for older people, 44 of them defence and so on.
And in the middle of this picture of 697 little grey boxes, I've got one-fifth of a box, £0.2 billion, because that's the budget of the Office for National Statistics.
And the point I'm making there is, look,
This tiny amount, about one 3,500th of public spending, is what we spend on getting the data that we then use to allocate almost all of the public spending, because to know how much health spending to spend in your local authority, how much education money to send there, we need to know how many people there are and what they're like.
So it's a way of representing how small...
this beautiful and enormously important thing is.
How would you rate the state of statistics and data in the UK?
They're well produced.
They use appropriate methodology.
All of that is very exciting.
And you and I, we know how much fabulous stuff there is.
If there's a difficulty that we have in the UK with statistics, I think the key one is that people don't realise how important they are.
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