Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it is yet?
Maybe not. What the Independent have done is confuse the UK’s deficit with our debt. Sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s not.
Let’s demonstrate using my personal finances, which are in almost as parlous a state as those of our great nation.
As a recent graduate, I have around £20,000 debt, repayments for which whoosh out of my bank account on direct debit. Thanks to overspending on beer, office snacks and (ahem) gym memberships, I spend around £50-a-month more than I earn, after I’ve paid all my bills.
To get back on an even keel, I don’t need to pay off my £20,000 debt: all I need to do is get a £600-a-year pay raise (which works out at £50-a-month), or spend £50 less.
So cancelling my gym membership, saving myself £20 each month, leaves me with just £30-a-month to find. It means I’ve tackled about half of my monthly shortfall.
It doesn’t mean I’ve saved £20, and have £19,980 to go. In fact, I haven’t paid back any of my debt. The regular repayments from my bank account will (eventually) sort that out. I just need to stop going further into debt each month.
The government is in exactly the same position. Provided debt isn’t ridiculous, and we’re making our repayments, we’re fine. The UK’s debt is just shy of £900bn. The cuts announced on Monday do nothing to address it.
The UK’s deficit (the gap between the government’s income and spending) is around £157bn. Most economists think around £48bn of this is temporary, due solely to the recession. That means around £109bn of cuts need to be found. So, in fairness to the Indie, the £6bn still remains a small fraction of the whole. There’s much worse to come.
In other words, a national broadsheet newspaper made the debt problem look around eight times worse than it is, doubtless worrying (or at the very least) confusing its readers. And it used the whole of its front page to do so.
It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with it. An error of such magnitude against a corporation would doubtless result in lawsuits. That obviously won’t happen in this case, but the Indie does owe its readers an apology, and a prominent correction.
I’m a sucker for a nice infographic (okay, a nice bit of chartporn). But data is important. As more and more is released and done with it, it’s crucial journalists learn to treat it properly - and that’ll only come when it’s treated with the same respect (and fear) that surrounds misspelling someone’s name.
That’s still a long, long way off.
Twitter makes some strange things possible. Earlier today, I sent a message to Joanna Geary having heard rumours she, like me, was attempting to learn some basic (in my case, very basic) coding.
Within a few minutes, coding over a beer was suggested. Within five more, we had a dozen potential takers. And a good few programmers offering their expertise.
So what the heck? Let’s give it a go.
We’re going to try to learn Ruby. This is because it’s meant to be fairly learn-able (we’ll see…), but also because it’s handy for all the kind of web apps journos might want: quick and messy data-driven projects, scraping, searches, and the like.
So, the plan is to find a pub with wifi (and beer), bring laptops, a few tutorials, and make a start. If it goes well, we’ll try to do it once a month or so and learn some stuff. If we’re lucky, someone might even do a 10-15 minute introduction (any volunteers?).
We’re suggesting meeting at 7pm on Wednesday 31st March. The (unconfirmed) venue is The Regent, a mere stone’s throw from Angel station. Bring your own laptop!
Hopefully, it’ll all be great. For anyone feeling keen, here’s a nice basic guide to installing Ruby and here’s a crazy-and-offbeat introduction/guide to it.
I’d love to get an idea of numbers so if you fancy coming along, please chuck me an email (james@jamesrb.co.uk) or send me an @ message on twitter (this is me).
Provided we find a free venue (which is looking good), it’ll be free of charge. Win.
Hope to see some of you there!
Below are my thoughts on another recent Help Me Investigate project - this time looking at Birmingham Council’s use of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows covert surveillance powers for investigating misdemeanours.
Figures released in response to this FOI request by Paul Bradshaw reveal - I believe, at first glance - that Birmingham is compartively trigger happy, using powers granted by the act six times more than typical councils.
Update 3pm Friday 7th: Please see the comments section for a health warning over the 1,707 statistic and resulting conclusion thaty Birmingham is so prolific a user of RIPA. This investigation remains a work in progress!
Birmingham accounts for roughly a 60th of the UK’s population (pop c. 1 million). In 2007 (calendar year) there were 1,707 council applications to use RIPA powers nationwide.
Unfortunanately these totals are given in financial years. For 2006/7 there were 115 uses of RIPA in Birmingham, in 2007/8 there were 99.
So conservatively assuming there were 100 uses of RIPA in 2007, Birmingham accounted for just under 6% of all local council RIPA uses, despite only accounting for 1% of the population. So it’s surveilling roughly six times as many of its citizens as the typical council.
Other issues get more subjective. Home Office guidlines stress “very strict safeguards” on RIPA use, which should be in “exceptional circumstances” only. Does having 22 officials authorised to use RIPA match that? Does surveilling 575 people? Personally I have my doubts.
Take fly tipping. RIPA has been used 27 times in relation to fly tipping, despite “late bins” being one of the example issues used to reassure the public on RIPA safeguards.
Relevent extract from Home Office:
“Local authorities have a range of powers available to them to tackle littering and fly tipping. However it shouldn’t be necessary or appropriate to use RIPA directed surveillance powers to observe people putting their rubbish bins out early for collection. RIPA allows certain public authorities to authorise covert surveillance and covert human intelligence sources for the prevention and detection of crime and prevention of disorder – but only where it is necessary and proportionate to do so.
When councils use RIPA we expect them to use these laws proportionately and sensibly in the interest of investigating crimes and protecting their communities.”
As to next steps, the prosecution issues and so forth are clearly going to prove difficult to appeal. Is there any hope of persuading some local bloggers - or better - local papers to pick up what’s been got already and trying to encourage some people to come forward?
Identifying some people involved would both humanise this, and help get a subjective handle on how reasonable Birmingham’s RIPA use is.
Any thoughts?
Help Me Investigate is - quite simply - fantastic. It’s a site designed to help people collaberate on investigations, usually based around questions. An early question was “on which Birmingham streets are the most parking tickets issued?”. And it’s been answered in style.
Heather Brooke used Freedom of Information to get hold of the full record of tickets issued in the last year. I posted a few (rambling) thoughts on the figures on the site, while this guy did a rather more thorough job. With graphs. The Birmingham Post then ran the story in full - and to its credit, cited HMI thoroughly.
All great stuff. And now the site’s out of beta, users are no longer restricted to asking questiond about Birmingham, which must come as a relief to users outside the West Midlands.
The only problem is, I’m worried it might just leave me jobless. Which would be, as they say, a bit of a bugger.
Data is slowly, painstakingly, starting to catch on in UK journalism. Computer Assisted Reporting, as data journalism is clunkily and unhelpfully dubbed, is huge in the US, with almost every paper having a CAR editor and many having full CAR teams. In the UK, the situation’s different - outside the web team and tech desk, even reporters able to do a bit of excel analysis are few and far between.
The Centre of Investigative Journalism has been spearheading a move to change that. Each year it flies over US CAR experts to train up UK journos, who are also being encouraged to start training up their newsrooms, and current journalism students in using data to produce stories (not mashups, not cool data, not spreadsheets, though all are nice - the emphasis is on stories).
Thanks to their efforts, and some damn good work priming the pump from some early freelance adopters - including (yet again) Heather Brooke - a bit of a market is starting to emerge. Stories based on FOI and data analysis will sell, just. Slowly it’s becoming possible to practise this newer brand of investigative journalism. With a bit of momentum, it could yet hit the newsrooms proper, as compared to chequebook journalism, this is cheap as chips.
And here’s where Help Me Investigate, despite its brilliance, gives me chills. Some of the best data journalism is incredibly complex, fraught with legal issues, and inordinately time-consuming. Some downright middling data journalism comes close. This article on police compensation was a CAR story.
The most complex bit of data-analysis in that story was simply working out rates per 100,000. But gathering FOI data from 43 police forces, in different formats, getting them into one sheet, cleaning the data, and working out reliable population estimates was both lengthy and dull. Then the real work started: contacting each force before publication to give chance to respond - then dealing with each force coming up with a string of excuses and (much lower) revised numbers. This relatively straightforward story ended up taking well over 50 man hours.
Most don’t. But if papers can get stories that look and feel like “investigations” from sites like HMI very cheaply - even free - the rationale for hiring data journalists or buying in their stories gets weaker, especially given the newsroom climate of constant cost-cutting.
Projects like the Birmingham car parking tickets investigation are great targets for collaberation, work everyone should be glad is being done, and perfectly suited to sites like HMI. The more complex stuff is likely less so. It would be a crying shame if a scheme like HMI led to less of this work being done.
There is an alternative school of thought that leads to a virtuous circle - data journalists can work with HMI on some investigations and keep a steady stream of compartively straightforward stories flowing. The journalists most eager to help out on the site will have the inside track to publish, and in turn will also have more of their own time to work on the complex stuff that takes full-time workers.
If CAR were more established in the UK, and newsroom culture wasn’t what it is, I’d tend immediately towards this latter happy option. But at present, the majority of the UK’s data journos do their stories as freelancers - and losing this sort of low-hanging fruit both hits income (and given the “news mix”) makes the pitching battle harder.
It would be a crying shame if the brilliantly intentioned - and rather nicely executed - social journalism project that is HMI actually ended up stifling a fledgling journalistic field. Maybe I’m far too negative. But it does seem the risk is there.
With thanks to the twittered contributions and back-and-forth from:
@paulbradshaw and @podnosh - two of the site’s founders
and @rasga and @coneee
Thoughts gratefully received…
Nigel Farrage and his UK Independence Party are keen to spout how 75% of the UK’s laws are made in the European Parliament (dubious itself - guesstimates vary from 9% to 85%).
So it’s odd, then, that they put in so little effort in the EU parliament. On Thursday, Farrage told the BBC Question Time audience he spent his time “representing his constituents” and so spent less time than others in Brussels.
There are 300 EU plenary sessions in a four year term. There are 1,461 days in four years. That’s plenty of time. So I looked a bit deeper at how hard UKIP MEPs actually work. The headline figures were published in today’s Independent on Sunday.
MEPs don’t make up a government, and don’t have local constituencies. Their job is to hold the EU commission accountable, scrutinise its work, and call on it to take action. So I tracked how often MEPs attended (for which they’re paid), and more importantly how often they spoke, asked questions, sat on committees and tabled motions.
The results are bad for eurosceptics: UKIP and the Conservatives, on average, do less work in Brussels than others.
UKIP scored worst by every measure, yet were still willing to accept an average of £57,800 in attendence allowance. Labour MEPs spoke twice as often as their UKIP counterparts, and asked five times as many questions. Scottish Labour MEP David Martin spoke more times than the ten-strong UKIP contigent combined.
Robert Kilroy-Silk spoke the least in Parliament, giving just seven short speeches in his four years over there. Given what he’s claimed in attendance allowance, that’s notionally equivilent to just under £6,000 per speech, making him the world’s second-best paid public speaker (Tony Blair is first).
Out of the big three parties, the Conservatives sit clearly behind Labour and the Lib Dems, who are neck-and-neck.
Conservative and UKIP MEPs might argue that they’re not part of the Brussels crowd, and so they don’t “engage” in the same way. But if they’re not putting the same effort in scrutinising what the Commission does, why are they applying for the job? Voters electing UKIP to stand up for Britain in Europe might find themselves seriously shortchanged…
Anyway, you can take a look at how your MEP’s done below, or click here to see it in a seperate window. If you have any questions about the data, or do anything interesting with it, let me know on twitter or by email.
Earlier today a long-overdue FOI response from Strathclyde police landed in my inbox - a mere 33 days past the legal time limit for response. This was, I’m told, “due to the way the relevant information is recorded on our [Strathclyde’s] various systems”.
Excellent - when I hand over my tax return late, I’m sure the authorities will be more than happy to hear I missed the legal deadline due to my shoddy “big pile of stuff” filing system.
Anyway, moving on to the results, Strathclyde are Scotland’s largest police force, and their spending reflect this. The force has spent just under £4m on PR in the last three years, spending £1,399,760 in 2007.
Their spending per 100,000 people, at £60,351, was the second highest in Scotland and 12th highest in the UK. Unlike many big spenders, their PR spend has increased significantly above inflation since 2005.
Spending on PR in 2007 was 15.9 per cent higher than 2005 - the second highest increase in Scotland.
The force employs a whopping 46 press and PR staff (only the met employ more), and 5 FOI officers.
