Nigel don't do Math

There was a recent item on BBC4's You and Yours on the rise of cavity claim companies. CIGA's CEO Nigel Donohue was interviewed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000110y

I agree with the thrust of the item. The rise in bogus claims by claims management companies is deeply unhelpful and muddies the waters for those with genuine complaints.  If the industry is swamped by bogus claims then it becomes even more difficult to prioritise the vulnerable who have had their homes destroyed by poorly installed or inappropriate retrofit.

However, in many ways the industry gets what it deserves as its redress system is so poor that it's not surprising that claims companies have latched on to it like a big fat leech.
The irony is that Nigel says that now that PPI is drying up; The claims companies look towards CWI as an income stream as and CIGA is a victim.
PPI redress was one of the best known examples of oversight finally being applied to a corrupt industry with a culture of pressuring millions of consumers into accepting bogus products.  If that is the case then welcome to the club!

And then we got the usual CIGA special stats from Nigel...

Nigel “We are currently dealing with on average 5000 claims per annum”.

I don’t think he meant average at all. I think he meant 5000 in the last year and the 5000 likely applies to the number of cases closed.  The graph below shows the increasing trend in CIGA concerns for CWI problems. A 3 or 4 year average would be actually be much lower but the trend is increasing quite markedly.

Source: CIGA Annual report 2018

He goes on  Nigel:"4 in every 1000 guarantees results in a legitimate claim for failures in materials and workmanship”

Now Nigel loves this figure because the other way of putting it sounds much worse: It's the same as saying that around twenty five thousand homes have claimed for poor workmanship and failures in materials over the last 23 years.
The phrase legitimate claim is unusual for CIGA. This implies that the claim is well founded and valid in terms of failures.

The 2018 CIGA annual report says "Overall over the 22 years the scheme has been operating only 0.4% of recorded installations have resulted in any concerns being reported to CIGA, representing just 4 in every thousand properties treated."

Nigel is using a very different vernacular when describing it as a 'legitimate claim'. The standard CIGA parlance is a ‘concern’ which as we know may not lead to redress. 

I’m not surprised he’s confused because the 2018 CIGA annual report uses ‘complain', ‘concern', and 'claim’  interchangeably all over the place. 

Ola Taiwo the Head of customer services in an email to me as recently as August reassured me that only 0.2% of installations result in a claim. Maybe he fell asleep during the last two annual briefings, as it hasn't been 0.2% for 2 years.
Clearly the mollified term 'concern' was proposed as part of a rebranding exercise because complaint is too negative/definitive and claim makes CIGA sound like an insurance company which it definitely isn't. 

In Nigel's section of of the 2018 Annual report he presents this differently in his own words:

“relative number of complaints by comparison is still low at 0.4% on average"

It’s not an average at all. Its number of 'concerns' that CIGA have recorded in proportion to the number of guarantees issued over the lifetime of the agency. This is expressed as a percentage to make it look small. 

Given that this 0.4% is the only statistic CIGA and Nigel ever use (and they do use it at every possible opportunity) you would think that they would at least get it right between them.

It’s clear why CIGA use this 4 in 1000 figure as 6.2million is a massive denominator. Even with the claims management firms harassing  CIGA it would take another 60000 complaints before Nigel will have to start using '5 in every 1000’ which again doesn’t sound too bad to joe public but when expressed as 'Thirty thousand homes' sounds pretty horrendous.

It's all a bit moot because CIGA ,allegedly, before the shake up in 2015 were known to not respond or record complaints correctly. Nigel admits on the radio programme that CIGA had its problems in the past and have made improvements. In the area of 'concerns' recording that is probably true as they have in the last few years switched to using a customer relations software which presumably keeps live stats of incoming concerns and closed concerns making it easy to generate accurate reports.

Here is just one example 2013 of someone who documented their troubles in detail:

"I contacted CIGA Ltd the Cavity Insulation Guarantee Agency but they have never responded after more than 12 months. I now realise that for all practical purposes they do not exist. But I tried and can be seen to have tried."

If there is indeed uncertainty over the number of concerns correctly recorded before the Nigel years then the 0.4% should clearly not be used as it grossly underestimates the problem.

What have we learnt? Not a lot. but

• We know that CIGA's concern rate is increasing and the number of new concerns in the last year is almost double that of 2015 (2500->4800) 
• We have learnt that senior CIGA management have difficulty understanding their own figures and are very inconsistent with their terminology
• CIGA stats that span the life time of the agency should be interpreted with a very discriminating eye 
• CEO Nigel does not understand averages 

In reference to the last point. I can thoroughly recommend the BBC bite size module on averages to Nigel.

For bonus points, if anyone can interpret this non sensical Graph from the CIGA 2018 annual report then they will get a free bag of CosyTherm insulation thought the post: