Lies, damn lies and statistics

The allegation that new migrants are jumping the queue for council housing and housing association homes was nailed as a myth by research recently published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
That study found that more than 60% of new migrants who had come to Britain in the past five years are living in privately rented accommodation, and most newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers are actually banned from access to social housing.

This was how the Guardian, rather triumphantly it has to be said, announced the publication of a new report by the EHRC last week that purported to demolish the urban myth that migrants receive unfair advantages when it comes to council house allocation.

Reading the Guardian's synopsis of the report, it would be easy to accept their conclusion that there is no perceivable bias in the allocation of council housing. To be fair, most journalists and commentators seem to share that conclusion. But then, we all know what lazy buggers they tend to be. After all, the report runs to 82 pages and is stuffed full of the sort of graphs that make you think you have a migraine. If the authors - Jill Rutter and Maria Lattore - have concluded that council house alllocation is totally untainted by any hint of politically correct thinking, then, hey, it's simpler just to accept the fact and move on to something more straightforward like the Swine 'Flu Panpanic.

Except, of course, that nothing is that simple. As the Guardian story points out, this report was commissioned by the EHRC in response to a warning from ex-Minister, Margaret Hodge, that local people in her constituency felt that council housing policy was skewed in favour of immigrants. Perhaps, given its genesis, it is unsurprising if it reached a diametrically opposite conclusion.

As we all know, statistics can be used to prove anything. In the same way, so can the parameters that are set for the research. Just a few examples are all that is needed to undermine the simplistic conclusions reached:
1. The authors restricted their research into people who arrived in Britain within the last five years. Mass immigration started in earnest almost as soon as Labour came to power in 1997. So, they deliberately chose to ignore the huge body of the huddled masses who arrived here between 97 and 2004; probably 1.2 million or thereabouts.
2, Included in the survey were a great wodge of Poles and other eastern Europeans, most of whom, as they acknowledge, were from relatively high socio-economic groups in their home countries and therefore capable both of finding work and accommodation without too much official help.
3. The authors analysed the housing policies of 50 local authorities. Wow, you might think, that's a lot. Well yes, until you start to look at which Councils they looked at and, more pertinently, those that didn't. For instance, they include such well-known immigrant hot spots as Shrewsbury, Plymouth and the Malvern Hills. They did not think to go to Bradford or Burnley. Granted they looked at five inner London boroughs but not Tower Hamlets.
Why exclude such well-known immigrant areas?
If the purpose of the report was to provide an accurate and balanced picture of the distribution of council housing between the indigenous populationb and immigrants, it failed dismally. If its brief were simply to try to allay fears and silence dissenters in the media, then it can probably be judged a total success.
Once again, statistics win the day over truth.