Zombie statistics: £200 figure that won't die lurches onto Today Programme
- 22 May 2012, 13:00
- Chris Peters
CC vhmh - flickr
Today's Telegraph piece on the
draft energy bill, 'Energy reforms will increase household
bills, minister Charles Hendry admits', appears to be doing a bit
of recycling. We've talked in the past about inaccurate
zombie energy stats that just won't die - and it looks like
this is another example.
The article, which appears online and in the Business section of
the paper, suggests household bills could rise by £200 to finance
the reforms in today's draft energy bill:
"Amid claims from analysts that annual
household bills could rise by as much as £200 to finance the
reforms [...]"
It appears to be repeating a number the
Telegraph quoted recently. But the Telegraph ought to know
better than to resurrect it, because we (and others) have explained
how and why it's wrong. A couple of weeks ago the Telegraph,
in its
coverage of the Queen's speech , suggested that "new subsidies"
introduced as part of the government's electricity market reforms
will add around £200 to consumer electricity bills "over the next
15 years".
We found that
the way this number had been calculated was wrong - the paper had
mistakenly used a figure showing DECC's assessment of how bills
would rise without new policies as the amount that they would rise
with new policies.
The £200 figure was (roughly) the rise in electricity prices
DECC expected without new policy measures, and included assumptions
about increasing wholesale fuel costs, as well as the effects of
existing government policies such as the renewables obligation. DECC claimed
that the increase would actually be £160.
It seems likely that this isn't the last time the £200 stat will
burst through the metaphorical door of the energy debate, and it
even got a hat-tip on the BBC's Today
programme this morning, in
an interview with Ed Davey:
John Humphrys: "It's not going to be
cheap is it? £200 per household?"
Ed Davey: "We believe, and all our analysis shows, that if [we]
didn't do electricity market reform, if we didn't make these
changes, bills would be £200 higher. I think that's where you get
your figure from. But because we're doing these reforms, because
we're taking these very innovative changes, actually that are
world-leading changes, game-changers in electricity markets,
because we're doing that, we think the cost of meeting this
infrastructure investment challenge will be much much less for
consumers."
We'll leave discussing whether £160 is "much less" as an
exercise for the reader, but a bit more precision on the numbers in
this debate would be nice. We sent a letter to the Telegraph last
week politely pointing out its mistake, but haven't heard anything
back.