I got a leaflet through my door a few days ago supporting the ‘No to AV’ campaign here in the UK. A cross-party group of politicians, including all of the Conservative party, oppose switching from the first-past-the-post system we currently use in parliamentary elections and switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) system of elections.
Among the claims in this leaflet was this:
The cost of AV is £250 million. This referendum alone is costing £91 million. And switching to AV would cost even more:
- £130 million on electronic vote counting machines
- £26 million on explaining the new system to voters
Instead, that money could provide: 2,503 doctors, 6,297 teachers, 8,107 nurses, 35,885 hip replacements or 69,832 school places. At a time when people are losing their jobs or having their pay frozen, should we really be spending this money on a politicians’ fix?
Do you see any problems with these stats? Firstly, the claim that ‘the cost of AV is £250 million’ is vague. Is that a one-off cost? Per year? Per election? I have no idea.
What about the fact that the money could provide 2,503 doctors? Is that their yearly salary? Is that the cost of training new doctors? How long could we pay 2,503 new doctors for before the money ran out? £250m divided by 2503 is just shy of £100,000, so if all doctors earn an average of £100,000, the £250 million would last just shy of a year.
But according to NHS Careers there are a number of different pay grades depending on experience, speciality etc. So what the AV leaflet should really say is:
| £250 million could buy: | ||
| # of doctors | Type | For |
| 2,503 | Junior Hospital Trainee doctors | 4 years, 164 days |
| 2,503 | Doctor in specialist training | 3 years, 131 days |
| 2,503 | Specialist/Associate Specialist doctors | Between 1 year, 153 days and 2 years, 259 days |
| 2,503 | Consultants | Between 363 days and 1 year, 124 days |
| 2,503 | Salaried GPs | Between 1 year, 84 days and 1 year, 310 days |
I got these numbers by calculating the yearly cost of 2,503 doctors of various salaries as given by the NHS careers site above, and then dividing 250 million by that number to calculate how long we could pay all those doctors before the money ran out. As is clear from the table, saying that “£250 million could provide 2,503 doctors” is pretty meaningless without at least a few additional qualifiers.
Also, according to the BMA, the cost of training a doctor is anywhere from £274,354 to £390,272, depending on the type of training. So the £250 million could be used to train anywhere from 640 to 911 doctors – still not close to the figure that the leaflet gives.
More problems arise when we examine the actual cost of AV itself. The claim that AV costs £250 million is based upon these figures:
| Referendum | £91m |
| Electronic voting machines | £130m |
| Explaining new system to voters | £26m |
| Total | £247m |
OK, so it’s not quite £250m, but I’m not going to quibble about a puny little £3m difference. But again, let’s think about these costs. The cost of the referendum itself is a one-off cost, as is educating the public. As far as the electronic vote counting machines, yeah, they sound expensive. But if you amortise the cost across, say, the life of one parliament (let’s say 4 years to be generous) then it comes to £32.5m per year, or approximately 0.000046% of total government spending.
Another argument the leaflet gives against AV is this:
AV would give the Lib Dems extra seats. That would mean more hung parliaments in which the Lib Dems get to choose who forms a government – by making back-room deals after the election’s over.
This may well be true. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the Conservatives (the main party behind the No to AV campaign) are glossing over the fact that these back-room deals are exactly how the Conservatives managed to form a government in the first place.
I understand that campaign literature needs to be biased and present a particular point of view in an attempt to convince people that your ideas are correct, but I don’t like being lied to or made to feel stupid. Feel free to try to persuade me, but don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, and don’t think I’m an idiot.
