Social Housing: Trevor Phillips and the EHRC Caught out Lying Again
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been caught out lying again over its recent claims about social housing allocation to immigrants. According to a new study released yesterday by independent think tank Civitas, the report “relied on invalid statistical reasoning” and was “baseless.”
In a remarkable report, titled “How not to beat the BNP! — A critique of the EHRC report on social housing allocation” by Professor Mervyn Stone of the Department of Statistical Science, University College London, Civitas has exposed the nonsense behind the widely publicised claims by the EHRC that immigrants do not get put in front of British people for social housing.
“The claim of a report published 7th July by the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — to have demonstrated that there is ‘no bias in allocation of social housing to immigrants’ — has been shown to be baseless by independent academic analysis,” Civitas said in its press release which accompanied the report.
“According to a leading statistical analyst, Professor Mervyn Stone of University College London, the figures that EHRC has disseminated as if they were evidence for the claim are of zero inferential value.
“The report therefore constitutes a serious betrayal of the public interest that whatever is the truth of the matter should be established scientifically. In consequence, Civitas has made a formal complaint to the UK Statistics Authority asking it to appraise the reliability of the statistical methods used by the report and the statistical reasoning that underlies its claims.”
Professor Stone introduced the paper as follows: “On July 7th, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued a ‘news release’ announcing that commissioned researchers had found ‘no bias in allocation of social housing to immigrants’. The report was given wide media coverage and by the end of the day there can have been few in the land who had not heard a claim that certain myths had been busted. The claim was reinforced by oft-repeated statistical percentages — among which the killer statistic was undoubtedly a figure of less than two percent.”
However, he went on to point out that the EHRC’s report was completely baseless.
“In support of its claim, EHRC misrepresents the meaning of two factual assertions,” he wrote. “The first is that in 2007 ‘less than two percent’ (1.8%) of social housing was occupied by migrants who arrived after 2002; and that ‘nine out of ten’ (87.8%) such homes were occupied by people born in the UK.
“To make any sense at all, a comparison has to be like-with-like, but this contrast is no such thing,” Professor Stone wrote.
“In 2007, the social housing stock was four million of which 72,000 (1.8%) were occupied by migrants and 3,500,000 (87.8%) by UK born. To estimate the chance of a new-migrant applicant getting a home, you would have to divide the 72,000 by the total number of migrant applicants entitled to housing. To estimate the comparable chance for the UK-born, you would first have to establish the number allocated between 2002 and 2007, before dividing it by the number of UK-born applicants for the same period.
“No calculation of that sort was done for the EHRC study. In fact, the extra data that would be needed to do it are nowhere to be found in the EHRC report. If it were done, the correction would almost certainly reduce the gap between the 1.8% and the 87.8%. Could it even be reversed and accepted as evidence against the EHRC claim? That is a possibility because, as the EHRC report concedes, ‘most new migrants have no entitlement to housing’ and because most of the 3,500,000 homes occupied by the UK-born will have been allocated before 2002.”
The director of Civitas, David Green, added in his formal press release on the matter that a “democracy relies on the honesty of official statistics so that our differences can be settled by peaceful debate, but the EHRC report on social housing fails the most fundamental tests.
“Government agencies have a duty to use public funds to commission objective research but the EHRC has failed to meet even the minimal standards of statistical rigour that the public is entitled to expect.”
Professor Stone’s full report can be downloaded here.
