The claim by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that there is no evidence that immigrants get favourable access to social housing was based on faulty reasoning.

Or so charges Professor Mervyn Stone in a report for Civitas. At the time EHRC made the claim, I drew attention to the different treatment it was given in various newspapers. But Professor Stone, a seasoned controversialist, thinks it deserved much closer examination, declaring the quality of its statistical thinking poor.

In essence, his argument is that nothing is proved by the fact that less than 2 per cent of all social housing is occupied by people who arrived in the UK in the past five years. The only comparison that matters is the proportion of applications for housing that succeed, for which one needs the denominator. One has to know how many immigrants applied, and how many succeeded: and then compare that with the number of native-born people who applied, and how many of them succeeded. Without such a direct like-for-like comparison, the claims made in the EHRC report are empty.

Civitas has made a formal complaint to the Statistics Authority, so we haven't heard the last of it. David Green, Director of Civitas, said: "Government agencies have a duty to use public funds to commission objective research but the EHRC has failed the meet even the minimal standards of statistical rigour that the public is entitled to expect."