Public Figures

Britain’s official statistics

Corrections

What we got wrong, and what the publishers quietly changed.

Two kinds of entry go in this log. The first is our own errors: a wrong figure, a wrong denominator, a claim that did not survive contact with the data. The second is other people’s. We keep every version of every file we have ever fetched, so when a publisher restates a figure for a period it had already published, we can see it — and since almost nobody else keeps those files, almost nobody else can.

A revision is not an accusation. Statistics get finalised, definitions get tightened, returns arrive late. What matters is that the number moved and that it is on the record that it moved.

The log

Nothing in it yet. The log opened with the site rather than with the first mistake, which is the only order in which a corrections log means anything.

If a figure here does not match the publisher’s file, tell us at joshplawman@gmail.com and the answer, either way, will be on this page.

Tests of the detector

Not corrections. These entries were produced deliberately, by feeding the revision detector a copy of a real release with one figure altered, to prove it catches one. They are listed here rather than deleted because a log that quietly drops its own test runs is a log you cannot audit.