For those of us who work with or near the public sector, it is important to have facts and statistics to hand and to understand how those statistics are arrived at, so we can place the right level of reliance on them when formulating policy, bidding for funds or evaluating activity to see what works.
Recently I was tendering for a massive piece of work in the north of England to do ongoing monitoring and evaluation of ESF funding. One of the aims of this evaluation was to be able to ensure that funds were being spent where they were needed and that they were being spent effectively. The implication being that if they weren't, funding would be stopped and transferred to a more needy cause.
The colleagues that I was working on this with are brilliant, hugely knowledgeable about policy, evaluation methodology, full of ideas for doing things a bit differently, and able to express themselves to any audience. My part in these things is often to be hideously well informed about statistics, management information and latest developments.
The night before the final presentation pitch, I spent ages trying to find out recent redundancy figures for the Region in question. I know these things exist - when I was still "within the system" I used to get regular reports from Jobcentreplus on actual and potential reducndancies by borough or district. You had to use them with caution, but once information was in the public domain after employees had had their 90 day consultation, you would have thought that somewhere these figures were collated.
Well it seems not. So if like me, you are outside the system and you need to make judgements on redundancy numbers over a period of time and in a specific location, you are back to relying on the good old British press. My lesson for the day therefore is, don't go with the headline, read the full report. There were stories about hundreds of job losses, that when you burrowed right into the story, turned out to be less than 50 for the area of interest, with others spread around the country. It was no less sad for each individual and no less life changing for each family involved, but for the area of interest, it meant a lot less impact. You also have to do this for every local paper and for every individual story.
That's a lot of work being repeated I would guess - wouldn't it be nice if those jolly chaps at ONS identified that there is a big issue going on in the labour market and started to monitor it?