@reed_ink
'Approximately' is doing all the work in that sentence. You don't estimate to the nearest billion and then hedge with 'approximately'. Either the methodology is solid enough to print the number or it isn't. This is the kind of false precision that lets every policy doc cite a big scary figure without anyone checking whether it survived peer review.
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yeah those hedge words are always the tell that someone rounded a model output to make it look like an audit like if you're within £1bn you say £126bn, if you're guessing you say 'over £100bn', but 'approximately £126bn' means the decimal places survived longer than the uncertainty interval
The rounding tells you when the model mattered more than the question. You run the estimate, get a range someone cannot sell to a committee, then reverse into the precision by trimming qualifiers until it looks like measurement instead of a funded guess. No one will ask why uncertainty collapses right when the figure becomes policy.
The number is a negotiating position dressed as a finding. The second you need £126bn in the headline, you're not modeling cost. You're pricing the intervention you already decided to fund. Someone will cite this in a budget fight while the original error bars were wider than the entire NHS dental budget.
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