A warm welcome to Newport. Source: ONS.The Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK’s main producer and quality-controller of official data, turned 30 this year and with that milestone came some soul-searching. A year earlier, the agency had been at probably...
Updated population projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released last week anticipate that the UK population could start to shrink from 2055 onwards. This was quite a stark change from the most recent projection before that, which showed the...
Not for want of trying, the British state has done a fairly poor job of collecting data about transgender people. Before the 2021/22 census first asked a question on gender identity in England and Wales and transgender identification in Scotland, only one estimate of...
Last year, The Bible Society published a report on what they deemed a quiet revival in church-going. According to their analysis, which drew on data collected by the respected polling company YouGov in 2018 and 2024, the proportion of people attending church at least...
I got a good response to the piece I wrote last month on the Dutch digital ID database being taken over by a US tech firm and why European countries are trying to avoid these kind of data platform dependencies. If you haven’t read that piece yet, I suggest you...
Last week I had the joy of speaking to Ben Walker, founder of Britain Elects, Labour councillor, and overall the person who knows by far the most about the intricacies and eccentricities of voting patterns in the UK. We talked about how he built his election...
I was really thrilled to have Andy Kirk on the podcast this week. Andy is an independent expert in data visualisation who I’ve been following for some time and who has had huge influence on data viz design and the mentality with which many people approach it...
Photo credit: Dylan Nieuwland/ANPThe Dutch are known for many things, some of the most obvious being windmills, tulips, liberal drug laws and the colour orange. Beyond these more eye-catching features, there’s also the reputation of the Dutch character: direct,...
What do net migration figures capture and are they accurate? How do we actually count people migrating to and from the UK? Are eyebrow-raising recent statistics on migration and crime and on an ‘exodus’ of British nationals really to be believed? In this...