I never trust statistics I haven’t forged myself. Case in point on the Today Programme this morning, with regards to public sector pensions.
Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS Union, made the reasonably well-known point that the relatively generous public sector pension provisions are a compensation for relatively lower pay during your career, compared to people in the private sector doing work of similar value. But he also questioned quite how generous those public sector pension provisions were: the average civil service pension is £4,000 a year, he said.
This was put to Frances Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister. Said Mr. Maude:

Let’s be clear about this. A civil servant on median salary, the middle salary, of £23,000, will retire after 40 years – a career of 40 years which many of them will have had – with a pension pot worth £500,000. Half a million pounds.

So how do both contributors score on forging your own stats?
Let’s take Mark Serwotka first: a quick Google search reveals he’s not quite right. The average civil service pension is around £6,000 per year – it’s the average local government pension that’s around £4,000. Neither of these numbers is something you’d want to live on in your old age, but one is 50% higher than the other. Having said that, using an average (mean) is probably being slightly generous here anyway because it allows the few individuals with the truly “gold-plated” pensions to drag everyone else’s contributions to the data set up. A median would be a much more useful figure if we had it.
Francis Maude does use the more meaningful median figure when he quotes civil service salaries^[1]. But watch how he hedges his bets: it’s only after a 40-year career, “which many of them will have”, that civil servants reach the mythical 500k pension pot. We have no information on how many people within the civil service actually will have the 40-year career. Given that the civil service employs over half a million people, Francis Maude’s “many” may refer to as little as 10% of that figure.
The other catch, of course, is that the assertion about the 500k pension pot is actually meaningless in the context of Defined Benefit pension schemes. Mr. Maude may have multiplied the annual pension resulting from a 40-year career at the median salary by the average life expectancy beyond retirement of civil servants to get that figure, but by definition a Defined Benefit scheme doesn’t have a “pot”.
So the Cabinet Office Minister is employing two tricks here: he has singled out a group of civil servants which may or may not be representative or significant, and he has deliberately quoted their pension benefits in a format which is designed to make them look larger, but is actually misleading and meaningless.
This is yet another example of policy by anecdote. Compare the stories of the £26,000 benefit scroungers to see the same approach being applied to different areas. What was utterly disgraceful about this morning’s episode, though, was that Jim Naughtie let it go through unchallenged. Most people don’t question the data they are presented with, but I would expect presenters of the caliber of Mr. Naughtie to do better than this.
Now, there may be (and probably is) a perfectly valid case for reforming public sector pensions, and the government’s proposals on the subject may even be the right thing to do. We will, however, never really know, because instead of presenting us with meaningful data and arguments, government ministers are relying on anecdotal, sensationalist soundbites.

[1] Interestingly, the median salary across all sectors in the UK is around the £21,000 mark. Does this mean that Mr. Serwotka’s assertions that public sector employees are paid less than private sector ones is not true either? Not necessarily. Remember the qualification: we’re talking about work of similar value. The national median earnings figure will include all types of work, from cleaning to being a chief executive. You would have to get a breakdown by sector and type of work to make a meaningful comparison. For time being, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Serwotka on this one.