Transport Insights

The government is having to backtrack on its big announcement about funding for council road maintenance in England “doubling” after I pointed out to the official statistics regulator that it was full of spin.

My biggest problem with this Treasury Press release in November was that it failed to take inflation into account by stating whether the promised future increase will be in real terms or cash terms.

Of course it’s in cash terms, which can always be used to make spending increases look bigger than they are in real terms.

The Office for Statistics Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority agreed with this point and the Treasury has promised to be clearer in future.

The other main trick that the spin doctors pulled was to compare two individual financial years that were five years apart, i.e. 2024-25 (the last funding settlement determined by the Tories) and 2029-30.

This meant a degree of cherry picking and using a previous figure rather as a comparator, rather than what would have been spent.

Note that chancellor Rachel Reeves said:

We are doubling the funding promised by the previous government

This clearly implies that the comparison is what the previous government “promised” to spend in future, which is untrue.

The cherry picking of financial years meant that the “doubling” claim involved comparing a single year against the highest spending level of a four-year settlement that is being ramped up each year.

The regulator agreed that calculating average annual funding would produce a different figure (that no longer represented any kind of “doubling”) but pointed out that the Treasury press release was clear about the years used for the comparison.

It told me that, in response to my concerns, the Department for Transport (DfT) is preparing an explanatory note to add to its funding page, which aims to provide more detail on how its transparency data can be used to compare across time periods. 

It said it is hopeful that this note will address my concern about HM Treasury comparing ‘a previous figure, not a forward-looking promise’.