The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills ought to know how to add up. But to judge from its 2008 R&D Scoreboard it has some problems in that area.

It highlights, without comment, an increase of 871 per cent in spending on research and development by the UK’s forest and paper sector – the fastest growth in spending of any sector of the economy. Wow! That’s sensational.

Unfortunately, it’s also meaningless, since there are only two companies in this business sector that claim to spend anything at all on R&D - and between them they spent a fairly piffling £8 million in 2007-08. The only conclusion you can safely draw is that one of them changed its reporting standards, was included in the scoreboard for the first time, or actually launched a smallish R&D project. Expressing this as a percentage change is statistically illiterate.

The scoreboard, an annual publication that seeks to discern the trends in R&D spending, raises eyebrows on almost every page. The biggest increase by any company was by AstraZeneca, which spent £581 million more on R&D in 2007 than in 2006. But on page 13 this is listed as a 29.8 per cent increase, and on page 32 as a 117 per cent increase.

And what’s one to make of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which claimed in 2007 to be spending £481 million a year on R&D, putting it 6th in the league table of the UK’s top spenders? None of the other banks came close. Barclays was next biggest, in 25th place and spending £118 million.

What on earth was RBS spending so much cash researching in 2007? Not the future, evidently. Not the looming credit crunch. Not the risks of sophisticated financial derivatives it now admits it didn’t understand. Not the toxic debts that brought it down. Nothing important to the survival of the bank, then.