Most journalists do not like numbers. They can get in the way of a decent political dogfight, which provides far more reliable fun than cluttering up a news report with unwieldy statistics. Why change the way a story is interpreted by examining the numbers yourself when so many interest groups and politicians can do the numbers work for you?

The BBC, where I worked for more than 25 years, is by no means the worst offender – but it has an obligation to break free from some of the sillier orthodoxies about which set of numbers matter and which do not. If you come across a BBC story merely asserting that petrol has soared to a "new record level" or hear a politician left unchallenged when making a claim that more money than ever is being spent on, say the NHS, you should consider asking for your licence money back.

Journalists have no excuse for not making the distinction between nominal figures and real ones that take inflation into account. For years, politicians under the cosh over health or education policy have trooped into BBC studios to proclaim that spending is at record levels. Such claims are largely gibberish unless accompanied by some analysis about the effects of inflation. Nominal spending rises all the time and most things cost more, too. But many things (white and electronic goods, for instance) are now vastly cheaper than they were even 10 years ago. Even petrol prices are – if we think of how long we have to work to earn enough to fill up a tank in comparison with previous eras of high petrol prices. We just don't like to be reminded of the fact.

It is not only a question of how statistics are used within reports but how they could help decide what stories to focus on in the first place. The waste of money on bungled defence contracts is awe-inspiring. A National Audit Office report published last October suggested that the cumulative overrun in Ministry of Defence procurement had reached £8.8bn – but that was only for the top 15 projects. That's the Home Office budget gone for a year at least.

But waste in procurement coming only in average dribbles of, say, a trivial £1bn a time (a third of the total income from the licence fee) seems to induce only a modicum of interest among news editors and correspondents.

I do not think that news values should be derived from a purely statistical approach, but greater interest in the scale of things might lead to a better quality of public debate.

Even the performance of the UK economy was for too long debated with too few statistical tools. We were told during the so-called boom years, until 2007, that British growth rates made us the "strongest economy in Europe". What did this mean? That from one particular base date we could show that we were growing faster than Germany or Sweden? That it was about time the other economies learned from us about how to manage things? Hardly.

There were some statistics around that would have raised more interesting questions: about whether Britain's underlying productivity problems had been solved, or its chronic inability to make the most of its workforce. And did the soundbite the "strongest economy in Europe" mean that we enjoyed a better economic standard of living than the Dutch or the Germans? Even at the time, never mind now, this was measurably not true. But not much mentioned.

Curiosity about data matters. Journalists and their editors should challenge more loudly and more often those who make daft claims based on dodgy statistics. It will take time to get rid of data debris, but we would all benefit.