British official statistics have never fully recovered from the 1980 Rayner report. Derek Rayner suggested that the purpose of government information was to serve the needs of government. His experience was drawn from Marks and Spencer, the retail company where he had been managing director, and the model in his mind was a management information system. But ministers are not managers and their needs are often for propaganda rather than facts. Accurate public information is a prerequisite of democracy.
Government statisticians are honest people and do not make numbers up. But the increasingly acute problems of official statistics are all familiar from private sector accounting.
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