"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"
Aneurin Bevan

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Frequency Analysis of Amendments

The following is the frequency of amendments plotted against clause index (ie the number of amendments tabled so far for each of the 305 clauses). It lists the amendments tabled for the Report stage in the Lords, and lists the non-government amendments.

Clearly clause 1 and 4 are important and hence several amendments have been applied. The two big peaks are clauses 22 and 25.

The interesting thing is that the amendments are clustered towards the low end. Why? Well you start reading a document from page 1 and read forward. When the document is complicated, convoluted and obfuscating you are likely to give up after a while.

Of course there are only 41 amendments in total and hence not enough to make any real conclusion. But if I were the government I would sneak in something really contentious after clause 250. The likelihood of anyone getting that far is small!

Update:

I have now plotted the frequency of the government amendments.

The red lines are the government amendments. The cluster at about 250 are changes to the information register. Hah! I bet you hadn't read those clauses when the Bill was first published, did you? Clear the government didn't either, since they've now got to fix them.

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