Being ‘Better than England’ doesn’t mean doing ‘good enough’

The Herald today reports on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s “growth tracker report” with the ‘good news’ that Scotland was the only region of the UK to avoid a fall in private sector employment last month. In other measures within the report, Scotland performed variably - often behind places like the South-west of England and ahead of the North-west of England and came 10th out of the 12 nations and regions in the final combined score.

It’s understandable to look at Scotland’s economic performance within the UK and to compare ourselves either to the UK average or to England-wide figures but it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of statistical comparisons. This goes especially when Scotland does buck the trend of the extreme economic centralisation of the UK (where almost everywhere except London and the South-east is ‘below the UK average’).

The problem comes when assuming that that UK average figure is some kind of baseline of adequacy. That being ‘UK average’ is ‘good enough’ and therefore anyone who is doing better than that average is doing better than ‘good enough’. This can be seen in perennial statistical arguments such as school exam results, A&E waiting times, child poverty figures or anywhere else where a declining trend or objectively poor outcome can be minimised by pointing south of the border. Is the fact that 22% of Scotland’s children live in poverty really made better by the fact that 31% of the UK’s children are poor? Would it be made worse if only 21% of the UK’s children were?

If “business growth” was a metric you particularly cared about and Scotland had topped that particular league table, would that have been a sign that Scotland’s businesses were “growing enough”?

Rather than limiting our baseline of comparison to England and/or the UK, Scotland needs to look at a broader set of comparisons. In fact, we used to do this regularly.

Before Brexit, the UK contributed a broad range of statistics to Eurostat - the EU’s central repository of statistics for nations, regions and local communities. In fact, it was a condition of our membership of the EU that our own national statistics were aligned with Eurostat’s methodologies so that nations could be easily compared to each other. It would be of little use, for example, if two nations defined “unemployment”, say, using measures so widely different that comparisons were meaningless. When Brexit happened, the UK initially promised to keep contributing statistics to Eurostat and promised to keep statistical measurements aligned via the agreement of a treaty between themselves and the EU. Unfortunately, then Prime Minister Boris Johnston just…didn’t bother to do it and the political forces in the UK against alignment to anything with a sniff of Europe about it have since prevented anyone else from picking up the loose thread.

The result is that the UK’s statistical measurements have started to drift away from the EU and Eurostat’s maps of measurements like GDP per capita have a large UK-shaped hole in them even while they include nearby non-EU states like Türkiye and Serbia.

But Scotland used to produce statistics directly for Eurostat, Eurostat’s methodological protocols are all open source, and the Scottish Government professes to maintain that Scotland should remain aligned with the EU in all ways possible pending our independence and reapplication to the union. So why not take a step to show the sincerity of this approach?

In 2018, we called for the creation of a Scottish Statistics Agency to act as a central repository for Scotland’s statistics and to actively fill gaps in statistical provision that were deemed necessary but weren’t being collected elsewhere. This policy won overwhelming support at the 2019 SNP conference, but leadership ignored the call from members and have never implemented it.

While Scotland probably can’t formally join Eurostat until we’re independent, we could publish our own map of Scottish statistics and include the EU stats alongside ours. We could move away from making our sole point of comparison our nearest neighbours down south and start comparing ourselves more broadly to our peer nations and those to whom we would like to aspire. Maybe then, we can break the spell of just being ‘better than England is good enough’ and start working towards Scotland being ‘good’.