EDIT: The Mail have now edited their headline to remove the word "each".

Today the Daily Mail have a story that combines two of their favourite bête noires - the internet and local government. The former is a morally degenerate playground for paedophiles and teenager layabouts that can cause cancer if you so much glance at a social networking site. The latter is a morally degenerate playground for people who like wasting tax-payers' money for doing very little work. I'd argue with that, but it's not worth it; it'd be easier to justify animal testing to a room full of Greens. Which, coincidentally, I'll be doing in Brighton City Hall next Saturday.

What you can argue about are statistics. Particular when they're used to generate patently absurd headlines like this one: "Town hall bans staff from using Facebook after they each waste 572 hours in ONE month." The numerically-challenged reporter, Ryan Kiesel, goes on to claim that:

"During the past year its employees have spent an average of 413 hours a month on the popular site - which has four million users in Britain - while at work."

Now, this is quite an impressive amount of time-wasting. It's even more impressive when you considered that a typical working week in the council is likely to be around 40 hours, and that in the a typical month of around 22 working days the total working time is likely to be around 180 hours.

413 is about two-and-a-quarter times 180. In other words, according to Ryan, not only are the 4,500 staff at Portsmouth City Council spending their entire working days on Facebook, they're also coming in at about 4am, and leaving sometime around midnight every working day. That's clearly absurd. What's much more likely is that they're working seven day weeks, allowing them to work from around 6am to 8 or 9pm every day, thus giving them a bit of time to sleep.

Or, just maybe, the figures quoted are utter bollocks.

Eventually as you read the article it becomes clear that the figures aren't for each worker, as the appallingly-written headline claims, but a combined total for all the the councils' staff. All 4,500 of them. Total usage apparently peaked in July at 572 hours and 38 minutes, or 34,358 minutes. That's for a month. If we divide this by 22 working days, we get 1,561 minutes wasted per day. If we divide that by the 4,500 staff we find the shocking truth.

Portsmouth City Council staff spent an average of 20.8 seconds using facebook every single day. No wonder this country is going to the dogs.