​THE General Election is nearly on us. Rightly, we will have some heated arguments and we politicians will disagree about almost everything. In the end it will be left to voters to decide who is right and who is wrong.

Many of those debates will be informed by statistics. We will often disagree about what the statistics show and how they should be interpreted but it is vital that the figures themselves should be beyond dispute.

That is why the UK Statistics Authority was created in 2008. After a number of controversies and suggestions that government statistics could be influenced by politicians, the Government created this independent body to ensure that published statistics have been produced to high professional standards. You can find out more about the Authority and National Statistics from their web site at  www.statistics.gov.uk

It was a serious matter, therefore, when the authority had to publicly comment on recent Conservative claims about crime levels. The authority is above party politics, but the Conservative party’s claims on violent crime were so inaccurate that the chairman felt it necessary to publicly rebuke them and say the way the party had used these statistics was “likely to mislead the public”.

They had compared figures from the 90s to figures from today despite knowing that the basis for collecting these figures changed in 2002. After that date the police were told to include a much wider range of crimes in their figures. They knew this but quoted the inaccurate comparison anyway and even refused to withdraw their claims when it was again pointed out to them. Their attitude seemed to be: “Why let the facts stand in the way of a good headline?”

The figures they should have used were from the British Crime Survey. Its figures have been collected on the same basis every year since 1981 and it takes account of all the crimes people have experienced not just the ones they told the police about. If the Conservatives had used these figures David Cameron would have had to report that violent crime has fallen by 41 per cent since 1997. He would have had to conclude that far from Britain being “broken” we are becoming a less dangerous and violent society and that Labour’s investment in record numbers of police officers, and the community support officers who help them, is paying off.

I believe one violent crime is one too many. I know that too many people still don’t feel safe in their own street and that includes some people right here in Thanet. But I also know that cutting investment in the police and scaring people with inaccurate crime figures won’t help.