The statistics regulator has urged Matt Hancock to improve the “trustworthiness” of the way he presents data on targets for coronavirus targeting.
Sir David Norgrove, the chair of the Statistics Authority, suggested the way daily testing figures were being announced was concealing the true picture.
He took the unusual step of writing an open letter to the health and social care secretary, reminding him of the importance of the “proper use of statistics … for the sake of clarity public confidence”.
He said Hancock needed to be clear about whether a target for 200,000 test a day by the end of May referred to testing capacity, tests administered, results received, or the number of people tested. And he said the sole focus on the nation number of tests “could mask helpful operational detail”.
UK Statistics Authority
(@UKStatsAuth)Our Chair has today written to @MattHancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care about the Government’s target for COVID-19 testing. https://t.co/lSVTpOV7GX pic.twitter.com/aep7wXePuD
Last week Boris Johnson said: “The ambition, clearly, is to get up to 200,000 a day by the end of this month, and then to go even higher.” But since then ministers have clarified that this is for capacity rather than tests carried out.
There has been confusion about the daily number of tests after the government admitted it was counting thousands of home tests that had been sent out, but not yet returned. The addition of 40,000 test kits sent out helped Hancock claim that he met a target of 100,000 tests by the end of April. After that the number of tests slipped well below 100,000 again until Sunday 10 May, when it was met again.
Norgrove said the government needed to improve how it presented test data. “There is limited detail about the nature and types of testing and it is hard to navigate to the best source of information,” he wrote. “It would support trustworthiness for the testing data … to be more straightforward to find, with detailed breakdowns and richer commentary.”
Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, accused the government of not being trustworthy in the way it set out testing data.
Speaking to the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Spiegelhalter said: “We get told lots of big numbers, precise numbers of tests being done – 96,878. Well, that’s not how many were done yesterday; it includes tests that were posted out.”
On Twitter, Prof Spiegelhalter described Norgrove’s letter as a “diplomatically-worded but strong public rebuke”.