honestlyreal

Or is it?

I don’t really know why I’m bothering to take issue with this article in the Sunday Express. Once I start on this sort of mission, when will I be able to stop?

Anyway, the lurid headline blares that the BBC spent £50,000 per day on taxis in the past year. Which is clearly a terrible thing, isn’t it?

Repeat after me: just because a number is a big number, it isn’t necessarily bad. We need to know more about the context.

Let’s look at the numbers here: note first that the £18.2m covers taxis + car hire. The Express, using a (not unreasonable for the BBC) 365 day year, correctly works out that this equates to about £50k per day. But in the third sentence we see that only £13.2m of this was spent on taxis. So straight away, the headline is inaccurate – and should read “BBC SPENDS £36,000 A DAY ON TAXIS”. Not quite as exciting, huh? But at least it wouldn’t make them look innumerate. Well, quite so quickly, anyway.

You’ll note I used the phrase “only £13.2m” above. Now if you’re an Express journalist you’re already frothing with rage – how can he say “only £13.2m”? etc. etc. Well, I am not trying to put any positive or negative gloss on the number. It’s just a number at the moment, until we’ve given it some context. “Only” means that the £13.2m part is “only” the taxi component. See the difference?

Now for some context. We also see that the BBC has around 19,000 employees. That helps to give us some idea of scale of its operation. That’s a lot of people. Doing quite complicated things in many instances. In lots of places. At odd times of day and night. In locations which might not all be easily reachable by public transport. And we are told that at least some of this enormous bill is being spent not on those 19,000 staff but on external people being featured in programmes. Which is starting to sound less odd, given that one might want to make sure they get where they’re supposed to be on time, to avoid far greater costs through delays.

And back to those 19,000 employees. That £50k figure, in that context, means that for every employee less than £2 is being spent per day on all that taxi transport. (Ok, the calculations are a little complicated by this 365 working day assumption, but even making big adjustments for that we’re still in the £2-3 range per employee per day.)

And what’s a typical taxi fare? Around £20 feels about right to me. So that means every day, for every 10 staff sitting working in an office or studio that they’ve got to under their own steam, by car or public transport, someone somewhere is making one taxi journey. One way.

Does that seem quite so shocking now?

I have a particular aversion to uninformed “scary big number” stories. As more public (and quasi-public) sector data gets released, I have a real worry that we’re going to see more of the stupid stuff, which will drown out less exciting but more notable facts. And that will be a tragedy.