A reading room for official numbers.
Okenitemode explains UK economic indicators for people who have to live with the headlines and do not have a statistics department down the corridor.
The deskWhy this exists
The releases are free. The vocabulary is not friendly. A percentage point, a revision, and a change of basket can reverse a sentence without any change in the shops outside the window. We started the desk at 5 Manse Ave, Whitburn, Bathgate, to write the missing middle: slower than a headline, shorter than a textbook, and tied to the publication that actually produced the number.
We are an editorial project. We are not a bank, not a fund, not a political office, and not authorised to advise you on investments, tax, or mortgages. If a decision depends on a figure, the figure should come from the Office for National Statistics, the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility, or HMRC, read in the original.
How a note gets written
The method is the same on every page, so you can tell when we are defining a term and when we are showing arithmetic we invented.
Start from the bulletin
Definitions follow the publishing institution. If the ONS and a newspaper disagree about a word, we side with the methodology note and say so.
Invent the example, label it
Worked numbers on this site are fictional. Live figures go stale between breakfast and lunch, and a stale figure dressed up as current is worse than a clear toy sum.
Stop before the tip
We will not tell you to buy, sell, fix a mortgage, or time a purchase. The explainer ends where a regulated adviser, or your own judgment, has to begin.
Write with the release open.
If a sentence in a bulletin will not sit still, send it. Include the publication name and the period. We read those notes on business days and reply from [email protected].
