Snow job

A spokesperson from the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) was on the BBC lunchtime news just now, complaining that the overnight snowfall had cost the economy "£100 million" because so many London workers had not been able to make it into work. Needless to say, it's all the fault of the transport system.

It's good to know that the trained monkeys the BCC employs to come up with this kind of entirely spurious statistic were dedicated enough to get in to the office today. These estimates of "losses" always appear when there's bad weather, a strike, a big sporting event etc. They should always be ignored (unless you have a blog to write). As the BCC knows perfectly well, the work that today's absentees would have done today was either done by their colleagues, or left for the absentees to catch up when they finally struggle back to the workplace. Even much more serious events such as hurricanes (or terrorist attacks) rarely cause even a blip in overall output statistics.

The BCC's real aim, of course, is to plead for more investment and better planning for public transport, so that disruption can be lessened the next time it snows. The interviewer helped out by asking the spokesperson what message business would like to convey to "the transport bosses". But hang on a second here. This used to be a useful stick for beating faceless public sector bureaucrats. But most of London's transport is now provided by private companies -- many of whom are presumably members of the BCC. So if the Chamber wants to call for better planning, it can just send an e-mail out to its own membership, rather than pitching up on the lunchtime news. Everybody wins: the BCC spokesperson and "statisticians" don't have to brave the storm in order to bring us their words of wisdom; members of the Metronet consortium don't get embarrassed in public by their own trade body; and the BBC News can devote more of its broadcast to viewers' pictures of their kids making snow angels.