Principal Components Modelling

Pay Gap Case Study #8 – 33 London Councils – We Are One

November 18, 2025 By Nigel Marriott

I am breaking a golden rule of pay gap reporting in this article, I am benchmarking the 33 London Borough Councils on their gender pay gap data!

Before you gasp in horror, let me say straightaway the outcome of this article is complete vindication of this golden rule. Benchmarking of employer pay gap data is statistically worthless. Pay gap data of all kinds is inherently multivariate and cannot be reduced to one number league tables. The story I will tell of the 33 councils of London in 2024 proves this point in spades. In effect, none of the councils have a gender pay gap despite all of them publishing data to the contrary.

EU Referendum 2016 #2 – Did your constituency vote Remain or Leave?

February 19, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

NOTE 19/2/16: This post is not yet complete. I will do my best to complete it soon as possible. Since I started writing this post, additional data has been made available and I now think that 400 out of 650 seats voted Leave. You can see an outline of my older model in my YouTube clip published in November 2016.

For those used to staying up for election night, the BBC coverage of the EU Referendum on 23rd June 2016 must have been disconcerting. Where were the figures showing how many seats Leave & Remain had won? Unlike a general election where the winner is the party with the largest number of seats, the referendum was decided by a popular vote with Leave winning with 17,410,742 votes to Remain’s 16,141,241 votes.

Also different was that the results were declared for the 399 counting areas (CA) used in EU elections rather than the more familiar 650 parliamentary constituencies. Of the 399 CAs, Leave won a majority in 270 CAs as shown in figure 1. However, the counting areas vary enormously in size from 1,799 eligible voters for the Isles of Scilly to 707,293 eligible voters for the city of Birmingham which makes it difficult to compare CAs. The apparently overwhelming victory for Leave in terms of CAs could be a statistical mirage with Leave winning small CAs and Remain winning large CAs.