By Paul Giles
Before we get started on this month’s update, we have a *Stop press* update on January’s “UK-EU goods exports real values” article. The full 2023 ONS trade figures were out on 15 February and this single picture shows the reported 2023 decline to Q3 extending into Q4. The real value of EU goods exports lost to date is now over £50bn, the annualised decline across the three years, January 1st 2021 to date, extended to 6%.
Where oh where is the “G” …?
There follows a brief tale of the difficulty in obtaining trade information, especially where institutions would rather, perhaps, leave it unrevealed. It leads onto a comparison with the difficulties suffered by those attempting, across 17 years and 12 ministers, meaningfully to investigate the sub-postmasters’ complaints.
How it started
From 22 June 2021 announcements under the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, Trade Secretary, Liz Truss and Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab (interesting that none of those three are still in government today, two+ years on, one not even as an MP) started arriving in relation to the Far East-based FTA “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” (CPTPP). The small gain to the UK’s GDP reported to arise from this arrangement, “0.08% long term”, was based on the Department of Business and Trade’s April 2021 “Strategic Approach” publication.
Multiple broadcasts subsequently, as we know, made this percentage “(in)famous”. The 0.08% held good, in fact, up until 22 November 2023, when page 74 of the Office of Budget Responsibility’s “Economic and Fiscal Outlook”, published in support of the Chancellor’s Annual Spending Review, reported it as amounting, in fact, only to half of the original announcement, i.e. 0.04%.
Commentators puzzled … what’s changed? For me, it’s been an exercise in finding the simple algorithm used. To do this, I emailed an existing contact at the OBR.
The revelation
“How was the 0.04% calculated?” (being just a two-figure algorithm, something that would take minutes to find and seconds to email out).
“I’ll find out”. Then silence. Then reminder. Then:
“Similar information has been requested … looking into the detail to ensure we have full and correct answers to enquiries.” Then, despite multiple reminders, terminal silence.
By now, mid-December, the only option was to revert to a freedom of information request (FoI). Advised to submit the FoI via HM Treasury as, per website, “OBR is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by HM Treasury.”
Response, after the maximum 21 business days “… HM Treasury does not hold information within the scope of your request …”
Now nearly three months on without an inch forward. Undaunted, we continue to seek details of one of the simplest algorithms ever published.
The sub-postmasters
At this point, one pauses to consider the sub-postmasters’ now much-publicised situation and the 17-year barriers to information reporting thrown up by the Post Office.
Fury today from the media and certain politicians “… why weren’t enquirers more persistent?” “Don’t take no for an answer!” Tell you what, how about an introductory course in achieving the disclosure of a two-figure algorithm before attempting to investigate something a magnitude of difficulty greater and including information an institution might be determined to withhold … ?!
The spin-off
Separately, but provoked by the above, a myriad of separate FoIs and associated enquiries teased some key information out of the successor to the 2021 “Strategic Approach”, i.e. the July 2023 “Impact Assessment” (IA).
An individual with the most incredible persistence and patience could have read through all 142 densely-typed pages and 287 footnotes and discover, on page 41/footnote 80, that, quite separately from the OBR’s calculations, the 0.08% had, in fact, been formally, quietly revised down to 0.06% … in other words, the original gain was 30% overstated.
How? A revision of trade expectations? No. A basic arithmetic error in the calculation of the 0.08% in the “Strategic Approach” document, subsequently corrected in the IA. How do we know? Following further persistence, the original algorithm used was revealed via an FoI. It had not been published in the Strategic Approach document nor was the error correction noted in the IA.
A measure of the “persistence and patience” required here is that, across the 45 million adults in the UK including multiple professionals whose job it is to uncover such changes, not one individual to my knowledge had revealed the reduction to 0.06% until, mid-January last, the House of Commons Library did, five months’ later!
Did the DBT announce the discovery of the error and resulting overstatement? Not in any publication I have seen!
The next stage
We continue to persist in the hope of finding out why the OBR alternatively consider that fall to be 50%. “Where oh where …”
