This is a serious issue. Data is infrastructure - essential for modern life, largely behind the scenes, and very visible if it fails (like clean water, electricity, etc). It's generation and use involve lots of trade offs and require someone with expertise and accountability to make them.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Good data is essential for policy. Today it’s been a year since we had a permanent National Statistician. No news on what is happening with the current recruitment which began Oct 2025. This is an under the bonnet issue that points to state failure 🧵 uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/stateme...

Scotland was one of the big emigrant nations of the 19th century. I look forward to visiting this museum when it’s up and running. www.thetimes.com/article/da91...

Outlander star backs visitor attraction to remember Scots émigrés

Sam Heughan lends support to centre planned for Stranraer where tens of thousands of people began their journeys to the Americas

thetimes.com

In my latest piece for Substack I reflect on new projections which raise the possibility that the UK population will shrink and ask, does a shrinking population mean we 'need' immigration? georginasturge.substack.com/p/does-a-shr...

New projections have the UK population starting to shrink from 2055 onwards. Should net migration drop to zero, the population could be back at its 1880s level in 100 years time. Should we be worried about a shrinking population? Does it mean we need immigration? open.substack.com/pub/georgina...

Does a shrinking population mean we need immigration?

New figures now anticipate a gradual fall beginning in the 2050s.

open.substack.com

How does your local area compare with others on migration? With local elections this week, we've just published a new edition of our local data guide. Explore how each local authority profiles on immigration, foreign students, asylum seekers and more. migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/projects/loc...

Local data on migrants in the UK - Migration Observatory

This guide has been developed to help people answer key questions about migrants in local areas around the UK: How many migrants are there in different local areas? How is this changing over time? Wha...

migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk

Immigration has been cited as an important issue for voters in the upcoming Scot and Welsh elections, but nation-specific immigration figures are not that easy to come by. We've gathered some of the main statistics here. Did you realise Scotland hosts more international students than France...?

Migration Observatory@migobs.bsky.social · 4mo ago

With devolved elections coming up this week, we've produced a crib sheet on migration in Scotland and Wales. While seeing the same migration patterns as the UK overall, the two nations are distinct in the difference migration makes to population change. migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/co...

£70m over *5 years* doesn't seem so crazy, does it? The fact is, trying to get an increasingly-reluctant public to respond to surveys the only way we can find out about unemployment. That costs a lot more than it used to in the days of mostly obedient respondents. www.thetimes.com/business/eco...

ONS spends almost £70m in search of reliable unemployment data

The Office for National Statistics reveals another £10.6m went towards its ‘transformed labour force survey’ last year

thetimes.com

Big change today with the ONS's new population forecast. Rather than expecting the UK population to keep growing until 2095, the current projections have it start to decline from 2055 onwards.

Migration Observatory@migobs.bsky.social · 4mo ago

ONS significantly downgrades UK population growth forecast on the back of falling net migration - with net migration central estimate reduced from 340k per year to 230k (means population of the UK would hit 71m by 2034, rather than 72.2m, as projected in 2022)

ONS significantly downgrades UK population growth forecast on the back of falling net migration - with net migration central estimate reduced from 340k per year to 230k (means population of the UK would hit 71m by 2034, rather than 72.2m, as projected in 2022)

A classic case of statistics becoming sharper with hindsight, requiring a longstanding narrative to be revised.

Toby Nangle@tobyn.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🚨 UK debt-to-GDP wasn’t what it used to be! www.ft.com/content/c6f2...

The number of people crossing by small boat this year compared to last year. The fall is very real and not seasonal. Little difference in numbers during the winter but since numbers increased in spring, half as many people are coming as this time last year. This is mainly because of European trends.

Wow - The Bible Society has retracted its Quiet Revival report which claimed polling showed a surge in UK church-going among the young. YouGov, which ran the polling, now admits that it "failed to activate key quality control technologies" preventing bias. humanists.uk/2026/03/26/b...

Bible Society retracts claims from Quiet Revival report after a year of campaigning for accurate data

There has been no ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity in Britain. Today, the Bible Society has retracted its claims that there is a quiet revival of Christianity in Britain based on a faulty and unreliabl...

humanists.uk

The reason is all to do with data linkage - the new name of the game in UK statistics. I wrote about it last week here georginasturge.substack.com/p/the-silent...

The silent creep of data linkage

Heavy-handed data grabs on transgender people and benefit claimants raise important questions

georginasturge.substack.com

Georgina Sturge@georginasturge.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Great news: 1.3 million people have been lifted out of poverty this morning! All thanks to a change in the statistics. After changing how income data is gathered, the DWP now believes it was over-estimating 'low income' levels by at least a million people in recent years, including 400k children.

Great news: 1.3 million people have been lifted out of poverty this morning! All thanks to a change in the statistics. After changing how income data is gathered, the DWP now believes it was over-estimating 'low income' levels by at least a million people in recent years, including 400k children.

Today a legal instrument comes into force unsealing the NHS records of former GIDS patients, the children's gender dysphoria clinic, because adult clinics had refused to give the data voluntarily. Data linkage is a new frontier - should we be concerned? georginasturge.substack.com/p/the-silent...

The silent creep of data linkage

Heavy-handed data grabs on transgender people and benefit claimants raise important questions

georginasturge.substack.com

New piece on the silent creep of data linkage, the latest frontier for UK statistics. georginasturge.substack.com/p/the-silent...

New Substack post just dropped 🙌 Data linkage is the new name of the game for UK statistics, but what does that mean for us as the subjects of that data? Is there any way that official use of the phrase "alternative to consent" is less sinister than it sounds? open.substack.com/pub/georgina...

The silent creep of data linkage

Heavy-handed data grabs on transgender people and benefit claimants raise important questions

open.substack.com

This is a very interesting piece from the Race Equality Foundation on the good that ethnicity data does & the complexities of collecting it. Brings up issues I covered in Sum of Us around how we decide on the categories for ethnicity and race. raceequalityfoundation.org.uk/blog/why-we-...

Why We Record Ethnicity – And Why It Matters - Race Equality Foundation

Chief Executive Jabeer Butt writes about why we record ethnicity data and its importance in this new blog from the Race Equality Foundation.

raceequalityfoundation.org.uk

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry

Exclusive: finding out who owns land will become simpler under plans to make the best use of green spaces and hit net zero targets

theguardian.com

This is a good article from @freemovement.bsky.social making the point I've made elsewhere that Denmark's 'huge' reduction in asylum applications is just the fall from a short-lived spike in Syrians during the 2015-16 crisis. UK context is also totally different. freemovement.org.uk/attempt-dete...

Much to my surprise, I have also become a tech sovereigntist. Tech fundamental to public and security systems should be under our control (sometimes in cooperation with similar countries- not US). The current sovereign AI strategy is shockingly weak. open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/s...

Sovereignty for sale

Tech monopolies and the future of the nation state

open.substack.com

New results from @natcen.bsky.social's British Social Attitudes survey show UK attitudes towards immigration are more divided than in the recent past. It's now a clean split where a third of people perceive it as 'bad', a third as 'good,' and a third have a neutral attitude towards it.

Poor ONS, their surveys are already suffering from non-response and now the BBC goes and puts it into our heads that their enumerators could be corporate spies 😅 blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/02/12/s...

Separating fact from fiction: how the ‘industry’ of survey collection is far more than a BBC plot device

Tina Thomas, Deputy Director for Social Survey Field Collection, explains how a compelling BBC plot device does not reflect how ONS surveys operate in real life, and reminds us of how our int

blog.ons.gov.uk

Interesting and reminds me of similar findings from a recent study on migration. Using the exact same dataset, researchers who expressed different personal views about immigration came up with different results which tended to support their pre-existing beliefs. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ideological bias in the production of research findings

There is a robust statistical relation between ideology and research findings when researchers test a policy-relevant hypothesis.

science.org

Conrad Hackett@conradhackett.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Fascinating paper! Scholars who are secular are more likely to believe in secularization & find evidence of it in their research. The opposite pattern is true for scholars who are religious. This is worth your time to read in full: sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...

Latest piece by @georginasturge.bsky.social is a masterclass in why we should be cautious with 'trend' headlines. The supposed 'Quiet Revival' of Christianity in Gen Z looks less like a spiritual shift & more like a quirk of polling methodology. georginasturge.substack.com/p/the-gen-z-...

The Gen-Z Christian 'revival', polling bots, and immigration

Botched online polling is unhelpful, but so is not having a clear picture of demographic change

georginasturge.substack.com

I actually didn’t realise the Bible Society had doubled down. There may have been a modest rise in young religiosity but we’re talking a percentage point or two. There is just no way the much higher BS poll results are accurate, sorry! BBC More or Less has been on it, case closed.

Conrad Hackett@conradhackett.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The Bible Society's @robb-s.bsky.social says he is now "more confident" in the Quiet Revival report's "overall story." The report famously claims church attendance has gone up a lot since 2018. However, data from national churches and the British Social Attitudes survey suggests otherwise.

This is really interesting for polling nerds.

Georgina Sturge@georginasturge.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I only recently found out about the Gen Z 'Christian revival,' where seemingly legitimate polls are showing a quadrupling of church attendance among young adults. Naturally, I had to look into the data myself, and found a more mixed picture than I'd expected. open.substack.com/pub/georgina...

I only recently found out about the Gen Z 'Christian revival,' where seemingly legitimate polls are showing a quadrupling of church attendance among young adults. Naturally, I had to look into the data myself, and found a more mixed picture than I'd expected. open.substack.com/pub/georgina...

The Gen-Z Christian 'revival', polling bots, and immigration

Botched online polling is unhelpful, but so is not having a clear picture of demographic change

open.substack.com

Well this is going to kick off, albeit in a nerdy train-spotter way. Dutch Railways have just signed a 12 year contract with an American tech provider, while the rest of the public sector is under strict instructions to ensure digital autonomy for critical infrastructure. www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...

NS besteedt ict deels uit aan Amerikaanse leverancier

Strategische autonomie: Ondanks alle discussies over strategische autonomie kiest NS een Amerikaanse beheerder voor cruciale IT-diensten. „Als iedereen zo handelt als NS, bouwen we nooit eigen digital...

nrc.nl

I only recently found out about the Gen Z 'Christian revival,' where seemingly legitimate polls are showing a quadrupling of church attendance among young adults. Naturally, I had to look into the data myself, and found a more mixed picture than I'd expected. open.substack.com/pub/georgina...

The Gen-Z Christian 'revival', polling bots, and immigration

Botched online polling is unhelpful, but so is not having a clear picture of demographic change

open.substack.com