About Civometry
Civometry publishes official United Kingdom statistics in a form a reader can use and check: one figure at a time, with the body that published it, the period it covers and the release it came from stated beside it. It is an independent project and is not part of, or endorsed by, any government body.
The rule every page keeps
Every number on this site is one of two things, and the page always says which:
- A published figure, reproduced without change from the body that published it.
- Arithmetic on published figures — a division, a subtraction, a rate, a rank — with the sum written out so it can be checked by hand. These are labelled as Civometry calculations and are never presented as official statistics.
There is no third category. Nothing is weighted, smoothed, modelled, interpolated or estimated to fill a gap, and no figure is generated by a language model. Where a figure does not exist for an area or a period, the page says so and gives the publisher’s reason. A missing figure is never shown as zero.
Where the figures come from
Only first-party official sources: the Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, HM Land Registry, the Ministry of Justice, MHCLG, DESNZ, National Records of Scotland, NISRA and the other bodies listed in the data catalogue. Each publication has its own page giving the file read, the release date and the metrics taken from it, and every release ingested is listed in releases.
Statistics are reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0 unless a publication states otherwise. Attribution belongs to the original publisher; Civometry should be named only for figures it calculated. How to cite gives the wording.
What the site does not do
- It does not say whether a change was caused by a government, a policy or a party. Where a figure is shown against a period of government, the page says the change occurred during that period and nothing more.
- It does not rank places as better or worse. Rankings order published figures; which end is better is a judgement the reader makes, and where a measure has a stated direction the page says whose judgement it is.
- It does not compare two figures that are not comparable. Different periods, different definitions or different denominators are reported as such instead of being subtracted.
- It does not fill silence. An unpublished, suppressed, withdrawn or stale figure is shown in that state, with the reason.
Mistakes
Figures are read from official files by code, and code has bugs. Every correction Civometry makes is published with the date, what was wrong and what changed, in the corrections register. Revisions made by the publishers themselves — which are normal and expected — are tracked separately in revisions, so a change by the ONS is never mistaken for a change by us. Where two official sources disagree, that is recorded in data conflicts rather than resolved silently.
What is not here yet, and why, is listed in the data gaps register.