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Illuminating the statistics
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From John Boothman.
DEPUTY Geoff Southern has evidently taken to heart the old adage that statistics should be used as a drunk uses a lamp-post: for support and not for illumination.
In his recent letter (JEP, 17 August), he argues that, even allowing for higher rates of pay, Jersey States workers are worse off than those in the UK and should not, therefore, be subject to a pay freeze. He claims that the Jersey Household Expenditure Survey 2004-5 showed that ‘the cost of living in Jersey is a massive 46% higher than the UK’.
This is completely untrue. The Household Expenditure Survey was concerned with patterns of expenditure and did not benchmark living costs in Jersey against those in the UK. Chapter 8 compared household expenditure trends and concluded that, on average, Jersey households spent 46.8% more than their UK counterparts.
However, this difference may be attributable to a number of factors: higher levels of consumption, higher quality goods and services, or higher prices. No attempt was made in the survey to apportion the additional spending between these categories, but commonsense suggests that it was probably a mixture of all three.
Given that pay levels are, on average, higher in Jersey than the UK, one would expect spending to be higher too, reflecting the generally higher living standards enjoyed by Jersey residents.
Not all of this extra spending can be attributed to higher prices.
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