Woodhouse Moor

I attended the Executive Board meeting and enjoyed it enormously: Councillor Procter (Conservative) patronising the public and losing votes every time he opened his mouth; Councillor Golton (Lib Dem) sharing with us his touching family-reminiscences and concluding sagely that it is ‘a generational issue’: we are privileged to be represented by intellects like that: the torch of John Stuart Mill still burns bright (I wonder how many Lib Dem councillors have read On Liberty: it’s awfully good); poor Councillor Monaghan (Lib Dem) squirming to tow the party line while not alienating his voters: a treat to listen to (how he’s got himself tied up with this farce I can’t imagine; he ought to find a way of extricating himself.) Finally, seeing the vote go through on the nod, so that we all knew that the talk meant nothing, and it was all only done for the entertainment of the public. I recommend it to anybody. And it’s free. Except it isn’t. We pay the bill, in advance, and during, and retrospectively.

Representatives from the three local community groups recently paid a visit to Keith Wakefield the leader of the Labour group to express their concern about the council’s clear determination to press ahead with its scheme to create designated barbeque areas on Woodhouse Moor in the face of overwhelming evidence that the consultation exercise was flawed. They showed him the same photographs of devastation that they have shown so many times to their own councillors, and explained to him how ordinary people now avoid the park whenever the weather is fine. They told him about the flawed consultation exercise and how the council rejects the testimony of residents who say they never received a survey form, preferring to believe the delivery company which claims to have delivered forms to every household but one of the 9,982 households that were supposed to receive them. They told him about the statistical evidence and the map that strongly indicate that residents are telling the truth when they say they never received forms. Councillor Wakefield said that he accepts that people are telling the truth and said the community has his full support in its fight to stop the barbeque scheme going ahead and that he’ll do all he can to help.  And he gave this promise, “I assure you – if Labour is re-elected – we’ll undo this crazy scheme”.

Parks and Countryside and the delivery firm claim that 9,982 survey forms were delivered to all of the 454 streets that lie within 800 metres of the Moor’s perimeter. And they tell us that they’ve received back 587 forms from 155 streets. That means that 299 streets never returned a form. Statistician Paul Marchant has worked out that the likelihood of that happening is less that 13 in a billion. But scientific evidence like this doesn’t impress Leeds City Council. Neither are they impressed by the testimony of local residents who insist they haven’t received a form preferring to believe the delivery company. At this point most people would give up trying to persuade the council, but local residents hereabouts are a determined bunch of people, and one of  them has produced this very revealing map. The red dots on it represent the 155 streets which according to Parks and Countryside returned forms. If you click on the map to enlarge it, you’ll see that the red dots are clustered in the Hyde Park area around the Harolds. This suggests that forms may have been delivered to these streets.  Then there’s a sprinkling of red dots in the North Hyde Park area and the northern half of Woodhouse, and a very light sprinking in Little Woodhouse.  These could be forms returned by people who picked them up at the drop-in sessions. Finally, there are no dots at all in the southern half of Woodhouse which strongly indicates that no forms were dleivered to this area.

It would be good if this additional evidence  persuaded the council to abandon the consultation exercise. But experience suggests that this is unlikely.

Statistician Paul Marchant has kindly agreed to let me publish an email he sent to the council explaining to them that the likelihood of  receiving no survey forms from 299 streets is less than 13 in a billion.  Paul addressed the email to Councillor Ryk Downes as Councillor Downes is the Scrutiny Board councillor who dismissed earlier statistical evidence indicating that the council’s consultation exercise is flawed. Paul sent a copy of the email to the INWAC councillors and the leaders of the three parties.




Dear Ryk,




I was told shortly after my original emailing that the number of streets I used was wrong and re-did the calculation based on the 454 valid streets. The results are basically the same in suggesting that getting responses from only 155 streets is improbable.




You seem to have some misunderstandings:




One does not need to assume that all streets have the same number of residents. My calculation assumes that the streets which did not respond only contained one house, to maximise the probability of non-response which is taken to be 1- 587/9982 i.e. 1- 5.9%. = 0.9412. The probability of none of the 299 streets generating even one response is, using the rule for independent probabilities, 0.9412 times itself 299 times or 13 parts in a billion….a very small number. (I chose the assumption of one house streets to maximise this probability, as any other choice will give an even smaller number.) Therefore I judge that there is a prima facie case suggesting that the exercise is flawed. Indeed I understand that several concerned local citizens say they did not receive the forms …. Why not believe them rather than the organisation doing the survey? As I said in my email, “What evidence can be given that the survey was carried out properly in the light of this improbable result?”




Your assertion that streets with 17 houses would ‘guarantee’ a response is not quite correct. It would not guarantee it …the average response equals one but is of course subject to probability and getting zero would be quite common…about 1/3.




Politicians seem to bandy statistics with an unwarranted air of confidence. You say “I believe ALL members of scrutiny were satisfied that enough data had been obtained.”…If your belief is correct, this is worrying…




It is true when you say that a sample of 1000 will estimate a proportion of a large population; say the proportion in favour of one of the major parties within a ‘margin of error’ of a few percent. It relies on equal selection probabilities. (A cook does not need to taste the whole of a pan of soup in order to know what the soup is like, sip will do. So it is with sampling, but it must be a fair sample!)  In the BBQ survey it seems the selection probabilities are in fact unknown and it appears indeed that there is ‘something funny going on’ from the result above.




The ‘What is a Survey’ guide (elementary material) available at the American Statistical Association’s web site  http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/

See  http://www.whatisasurvey.info/ . (I recommend it in my work at Leeds Metropolitan University). It outlines problems in surveys such as that due to non-response. The book ‘Survey Research Methods’ by Floyd Fowler is fairly light and good.




I would encourage the council to engage proper professional statistical advice for statistical issues. The danger is that otherwise the ‘information’ obtained is likely to be bunkum.




Yours sincerely,


Paul Marchant