Giving the lie to the HPC stats on how well they protect the public

A colleague from Scotland has done some hard work on the statistics of the HPC and has offered them for circulation. He asks that if you want to reproduce them, please do so in full to avoid misrepresenation:

For the period 2007-2008:
• The HPC’s operating expenditure was £11.58m, of which payroll costs amounted to £4.08m (35.3%), legal expenses £2.27m (19.6%), facilities management £1.13m (9.8%) and “partners” (assessors and other professionals) £1.11m (9.6%).
• The HPC employed 105 full time equivalent staff, costing £2.82m in wages and salaries, representing an average salary of £26,770.
• Considering allegations about the fitness to practise of registrants cost £3.76m (32.5% of overall expenditure).
• Of the 424 total allegations made against registrants, 108 (25.5%) came from the public, compared with 171 (40.3%) from employers and 63 (14.9%) from the HPC itself.
• 299 allegations (70.5%) of the total were considered, taking an average of 32 weeks before a case was heard by an Investigating Panel.
• 63 (58.3%) of the allegations from the public were heard, and only 18 (28.6%) of these allegations were found to have a case to answer.
• Each allegation with a case to answer which came from the public represented an HPC expenditure of £643k.