How The Guardian completely misreported an opinion poll finding

Last Thursday, The Guardian‘s G2 section carried this rather surprising claim:

According to Keep Britain Tidy, we write more letters to our elected representatives, locally and in Westminster, about dog fouling than we do about anything else.

I did a bit of a double-take when I read it because, in my time, I’ve both dealt with quite a lot of correspondence from the public to elected representatives, worked closely with people who have dealt with even more correspondence and trained people who have dealt with yet more correspondence. And I’ve never got a hint that this is anywhere close to being true. Sure, dog fouling crops up now and again. But the issue people write about most?

So I thought I’d ask Keep Britain Tidy for the facts behind the story (credit to them for replying fully and in detail), and this is what I discovered.

First, although The Guardian reported this as if it were current information, the poll in question according to Keep Britain Tidy was conducted in 2002.

Second, it wasn’t a survey of what topics people have written about, but rather about what issues they “would or had” complained about. Asking what people might do rather than actually have done often gets you very different answers.

But the real killer is that, third, people were only given a limited range of topics to choose from when answering this question, all of which were to do with local environmental quality.

So another – and more accurate – way of wording it would have been, “According to Keep Britain Tidy, seven years ago we said we might write more letters to our elected representatives, locally and in Westminster, about dog fouling than any other of a small range of other local environmental issues.”

Not nearly as dramatic. But rather more believable. Ooops.

We all make mistakes, but I do wonder how such an obviously implausible claim made its way all the way through to the final version of the story seemingly without anyone thinking to check back to the original source?

PS Given how helpful Keep Britain Tidy were, it seems only fair to repeat the point they made about the issue more generally: 46% of participants wanted the council to keep them informed of any changes to services linked to tackling dog fouling.