FactCheck: Casting an Eye over Westminster’s jailbirds
”0.13% - percentage of general population now in prison. 0.61% – percentage of members of the last House of Commons now in prison.”
Private Eye No 1289
The background
The satirists at Private Eye came up with a unique slant on the MPs’ expenses scandal last week when they compared the percentage of the general population in prison with the percentage of corrupt MPs from the last House of Commons to be jailed for cheating the public purse.
Do the figures add up? And how does the jailing of Conservative peer Lord Taylor of Warwick on Tuesday affect the Westminster crime rate?
The analysis
Lord Taylor is the fifth Parliamentarian to hear the clang of the prison gate after making false claims for living expenses at the taxpayer’s expense.
The first black Conservative peer made £11,277 worth of claims for travel and overnight subsistence, purporting to live in Oxford when he was really living in London.
Four former Labour MPs – David Chaytor, Eric Illsley, Jim Devine and Elliot Morley – have already received jail terms for fiddling their expenses.
There are 85,361 people in prison, according to Prison Service figures from last month.
The latest figures – from 2009 – put the UK population at 61,792,000. It’s almost certain that has now risen, but we don’t know how much by, so it seems reasonable to round it up to 62 million.
That gives us a percentage of 0.138 per cent of the general population behind bars.
And four MPs imprisoned, out of the 650 who sit in the Commons, does indeed equate to 0.61 per cent.
If we were being pedantic, we’d point out that two of the four disgraced MPs – have now been released. Indeed, only three were actually in prison at the same time, since Ilsley was released before Morley was offered his first spoonful of porridge.
If we take Lord Taylor into account, we get five politicians jailed out of 1,479 members of the Commons and the Lords combined. That works out as 0.3 per cent of all members of the last Parliament who ended up behind bars.
The verdict
Let’s put it like this: an MP elected to the last Parliament was four times more likely to be jailed than the average Briton.
And if we take the House of Lords into account, it seems that a politician from either House was more than twice as likely to go to jail than the man or woman in the street.
We’ve only quibbled very slightly with the wording of this claim. We’re not going to argue with the sentiment, so it’s hats off to Private Eye for pointing out one of the biggest ironies of the expenses saga.
Another Tory peer, Lord Hanningfield, is due to be sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court next month after being convicted of fraudulently claiming nearly £14,000 of Lords expenses.
If the judge sends him to prison too, we’ll have to revisit the statistics to throw the jailbird proclivities of Britain’s rulers into even sharper focus.
By Patrick Worrall
There are 16 comments on this post
Last paragraph – you might as well do the calculations now and save time on the day
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Surely the calculations should be based on the adult population of the UK not the total population.
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What’s the % of the UK population in the same age range as MPs who are in jail?
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Nice of you to promote an amusing insight from Private Eye.
It happens that MPs are much more than four times as exposed to the temptation to fiddle their expenses! They are just as human as anyone else.
And MPs didn’t realise that they had passed the Freedom of Information Act into law which made these revelations possible.
No wonder a former (Tory) Prime Minister declared that only ‘left-wing busy-bodies’ wanted a FoI Act!
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It’s one of those rather meaningless statistics that the media love. I wonder how many business people (or media people for that matter) who fiddle their expenses get prosecuted by their employer, rather than just sacked. Moreover, the total cost of the expenses scandal (value of expenses fiddles + cost of enquiries & setting up & running new control system) is massively dwarfed by the scandal of the NHS IT system, for which, as far as I can tell, no-one has been held accountable. Yet there must be Minsietrs, senior civil servants, contractors & some of the monitoring bodies like the Treasury & Cabinet Office who allowed £100s of millions to be wasted. Yet apart from a tough PAC hearing, this one has neatly disappeared under the carpet & all concerned escaped scot free. Yet the public money wasted has been immense. Yet no media interest, no public anger – or even interest. I wonder why?
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Stats – Love’em.
Just wondering what the figures would look like if you compared our Honourable Representatives guilty of cheating on their expenses versus those found cheating the benefit system; throw into the numbers those MPs let off with a slapped wrist, or to slope away into retirement, and the numbers could be even more interesting.
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Without trivialising what the MPs did if they had been in any other walk of life they would not have been imprisoned for what they did. How often do we hear of criminals being given non-custodial sentences for their 10th court appearance. I have seen cases with much larger monetary value get away with suspended sentences. It is only because they have been made an example of that there is such a high percentage.
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If what Hanningfield said about all members of the House of Lords “at it”, then there could be another 800 to go. That should alter the figures a bit.
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Lying with stats! Surely, surely, you should only use the adult population to calculate this. Since all mps are adults (chronologically, I mean), the % does not change. But, if you now want to compare this to the % of the adult population in prison, you may find that the argument does not hold…
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Of course if all the MPs who should be in prison because of their expenses fiddles were included, the figure would be even higher.
And they are lecturing FIFA! Guess it takes one to know one
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[...] what not. Maybe we should just throw all the MPs in prison as a preventative measure – they are four times more likely to end up there than the general public anyway. ____________________________ A [...]
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So how likely is this just a sampling error? If we took 650 adults chosen at random from the population what is the chance that we would get the same result?
Add in the change in sentencing policy exhibited by the judges in this case, and the increased chance of discovery because of their public profile…
Of course Private Eye shied away from the equally invalid (and racist) comment about the percentage of black parliamentarians in jail.
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[...] Source: http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-casting-an-eye-over-westminsters-jailbirds/6685 [...]
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[...] and direct diplomatic operations. Well I never: MPs elected to the last (2005-2010) parliament were four times more likely to go to prison than the average Briton, Private Eye [...]
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[...] approach tactful operations. Well we never: MPs inaugurated to a final (2005-2010) legislature were four times some-more expected to go to jail than a normal Briton, Private Eye [...]
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[...] and direct diplomatic operations. Well I never: MPs elected to the last (2005-2010) parliament were four times more likely to go to prison than the average Briton, Private Eye [...]
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