Humberside False Claims

17 Sep 2012         Added amended complaint to Police Authority

28 Aug 2012      Complaint to Humberside Police Authority

20 Aug 2012       Reply from Chief Constable a(mislaid) nd my reply

08 Aug 2o12      Added letter to Chief Constabe

04 Aug 2012     Link added to the Civil Service Code

31 July  2012    Further correspondence added

28 July 2012     Further correspondence added

10 July 2012    Added my letter of complaint to Humberside Councils and others

12 June 2012 Added further emails with Humberside Police and my appeal to the IPCC

31 May 2012 Added Humberside Police’s rejection of my complaint,

my response and complaints to the IPCC

28 May 2012 East Riding refusal and my reply added

17 May 2012 Final Complaint to Humber Police added

Further updates 16 May, adding dates to documents and correcting some Excel files

Updated with more correspondence and analysis 10th May 2012, includin my reply to the DfT. Tomorrow my formal complaint to the police about misconduct in public office

These pages show how Safer Roads Humber make in their 2010/11 report and elsewhere make utterly preposterous claims for accident and casualty reductions supposedly achieved by their cameras, and then allocate largely spurious valuations to those reductions. The effect is of course to give a wholly false impression of the value for money their organisation achieves.

In the early years of speed camera partnerships many or most sought to give the impression that any and all reductions in accidents and casualties recorded at camera sites were inherently due to the presence of their cameras and nothing else. After a few years, in the face of vehement complaints,  most Partnerships stopped making such claims, some admitting that there was no such direct link, and many no longer seeking to quantify the benefits they think they achieve.

However Humberside’s 2010/11 report makes some of the most blatantly false and misleading claims I have seen in 12 years’ study of these subjects, The documents I will provide here show how their claims are clearly based on ignoring the other reasons – long term trend,  changes in local traffic volume, changes in reporting levels of non-fatal injuries and in particular regression to the mean (in this context, regression to underlying trend) – that lead to reductions, so that they can claim that all of the observed reductions are due to their cameras and nothing else.

To add insult to injury they then multiply the casualities supposedly saved by DfT “values” to arrive at what they imply to be cash savings far greater than their operating costs. The two problems here are that (a) the “values” allocated to pain and suffering that form a major part of the totals are not cash at all, but entirely theoretical and notional and therefore appear in no known ledger and (b) the “lost output” values that also comprise a large part of the total is not lost at all – because output is determined by demand not by labour availability – i.e. when one person is not available to work, someone else takes over. As any student economist would know.

The documents listed below in chronological order will shortly include my informal complaint to Humberside and the Yorkshire Post about the false claims in a YP article, followed by the PR for the 2010-11 report, the report itself and the Excel sheets. The first sheet is Humberside’s original, the others are reduced versions to make the relavant data more clear. My repeated complaints to Humberside askin that they withdaw these false claims have been refused as of 8th May 2o12.

This is not just of course about incompetence or deliberately misleading readers, it is about the skewing of important road safety analysis heavily in favour of speed cameras to the detriment of other arguably better and more cost effective methods. It is also of course about serious misrepresentation in public documents of the benefits provided the organisation.

My reply to the DfT is now shown and it will be sent to arrive am on 11th May.

On 15th May I received a reply from the DfT pointing out that as of April 2007 they do not tell Partnerships how to do their calculations. I replied pointing out that they have ignored everything else and want answers. I also copied the DfT reply to SRH asking them again to withdraw their false claims. These are documents 22, 23 and 24 below

Further documens, now up to no 57, show how the authorities are stone-walling, refusing to address my complaint and refusing to ensure that the false claims are withdrawn

 

 

Downloads

Comments are closed.