Stats watchdog rebukes Grayling for dodgy crime figures

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

The BBC’s Mark Easton has been leading the story that Chris Grayling, the Tories’ shadow home secretary, used “profoundly misleading” statistics in order to promote the Tories’ so-called “Broken Britain” agenda.

With David Cameron reportedly thinking of removing Grayling from his shadow cabinet, Easton has now got hold of a letter to Mr Grayling in which Sir Michael Scholar of the UK Statistics Authority rebukes his actions as “likely to damage public trust in statistics.”

In an email to Mark Easton yesterday, Grayling had said:

But those figures compare statistics before 2002 to those after, despite a big change in the relevant measurementused since:

This final image was not from Sir Michael Scholar. Somewhere else: