The article below is well worth a read, mindful that the general attitudes behind such assertion-making is something that doesn't help the hobby in the long term, because they are simply wrong.
We've also seen something similar with the RSGB in its claims of membership benefits; for a long time, it claimed, and may still claim (I don't know) that members were "more likely" than non-members to gain planning consent for antennas.
When asked, no evidence was available to support this claim and it's not surprising; they would have had to run a double-blind assessment with the exact-same officers and exact-same applications for hundreds if not thousands of cases to reach statistically-valid conclusions. Designing such an experiment is, itself, highly non-trivial and clearly beyond the abilities of the RSGB board.
There is also the point that the claim related to membership per se - advice about planning matters is, of course, available from many other sources not related to RSGB membership, including now from admittedly questionable but improving AI.
So the real test would be more along the lines of those members who gained consent after using the RSGB planning service and those who were not members but used an alternative advice service of some sort. You could also assess the success of members who, despite that fact, didn't use the RSGB planning service.
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