I would like to draw your attention to how Councillor Kevin Davis, the head of Kingston Council, is spinning survey results to draw a picture of what residents’ views are in Kingston.

Councillor Davis’ Twitter account states today that: “Seventy-eight per cent of people across the borough are happy with their local area as a place to live.”

He is basing the remark on an All in One survey that has recently been conducted for the council.

But a quick look at the data shows that this headline is highly misleading.

Firstly, the survey states that it has a response rate of 15.1 per cent. However, this figure is calculated by dividing the number of responses – 9,277 – by the number of households, not by the adult population: a clear apples and pears comparison.

If you use the adult population of 129,290 people from the 2011 census as the divisor – the response rate is only 7.1 per cent, meaning that 92.9 per cent of people in Kingston did not reply to the survey.

Given that the population of Kingston has expanded since 2011, the actual response rate must in fact be even lower.

Of course, a survey is always based on a sample, but this one was sent out to the entire population of Kingston, not a scientifically selected sample.

This makes any result meaningless unless the people who respond reflect accurately the make-up of the population. In this case, they do not.

So 78 per cent cannot possibly refer to borough residents – it can only refer to survey respondents. Seventyeight per cent of survey respondents equals only 5.5 per cent of borough residents who are actually, according to the survey, happy with their local area.

Secondly, Councillor Davis is also cherry picking the results he is posting.

He is not so keen to publicise, for example, facts such as the 76 per cent of people who responded who do not believe they can influence decisions affecting their local area, the 30 per cent of people who responded who believe Kingston offers value for money, the 77 per cent of people who responded who are either dissatisfied or neither satisfied or dissatisfied with local services and that more than 95 per cent of people who responded rated parks and open spaces as the most important thing to do in the borough.

All of this makes Councillor Davis’ statement about growth and development in the survey report: “The general consensus from this question is that Kingston should embrace growth," seem inaccurate.

Given that Councillor Davis is sponsoring developments designed to increase the borough’s population by a third, you might also think it is more than a little self serving.

ANGUS SCOTT
Kingston