The edition of 17 August 2026
Nothing notable published today.
We would rather send you this than manufacture significance.
Five of our eight datasets were in a release window this morning and all five were fetched: the monthly prison bulletin, DfT's port freight tables with the CAA's airport statistics, HM Land Registry's house price index, the claimant count, and NHS referral-to-treatment waiting times. None of them had anything new in it. The latest prison bulletin is still July 2026, the latest airport month is still May 2026, house prices still reach May 2026, the claimant count still reaches June 2026, and the waiting-times table is still June 2026 — the same figures we read on Thursday, and every value compared between vintages came back unchanged. The Ministry of Justice passed over its usual second Friday, so the August prison bulletin is now due within days.
This edition also stands in for Saturday and Sunday, which went unpublished: a fault in the software that moves publishers' files into our archive, not in the files themselves, stopped Saturday's run partway. Saturday's fetched files were recovered and folded into the archive today, compared, and found identical to Thursday's and to this morning's. Today's edition is late for the same reason.