Robert Cuffe

Your banknote redesign ideas - from British Bulldogs to Basil Fawlty The Bank of England wants views on themes for its next series of banknotes, and BBC readers are full of ideas.

Surely should be a portrait of Notey McNoteface?

British Bulldogs to Basil Fawlty - your banknote redesign ideas www.bbc.com/news/article...

Strong +1. Civil service statisticians made excellent technical contributions to recent UK Statistics Assembly.

UK's data agency has 'deep seated' issues, review finds

ONS will reallocate ~10m worth of FTE to fix core econ stats
National Stato job will be split into two: technical + running org
Govt will look at the legislation defining roles and governance of UK stats

www.bbc.com/news/article...

I’m a statistician who has to write data as a singular. Don’t get me started on style guides….

Grammar, spelling and punctuation

House style is to write with some lower case if you can pronounce it as a word: NHS but Nafta.

www.bbc.co.uk/newsstylegui...

Among the new BBC editorial guidelines taking effect in September is an expanded chapter on stats, data, polls and surveys

www.bbc.co.uk/editorialgui...

Trump tariffs live updates: EU says 'major blow to world economy' as China vows retaliation The US president announces a 10% tariff on all imports, with further measures targeting countries the White House call the

Looks like the left hand col is an size of trade deficit with a country (relative to total imports from that country).

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c1...

Trump says that there’s a “minimum baseline tariff” of 10% being applied.

Both UK and Singapore are alleged to be imposing 10% tariffs on US (left had col). Unusually, the rate US will charge is not half that but is 10%.

Says US tariffs are set at half the tariffs (including non-tariff trade barriers) that those countries impose on US.

Trump announces 20% ‘reciprocal’ tariffs for EU. 10% for UK.

Our complaint re the growth in health benefits has been upheld: osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/corresponden...: "The statement that the number of people claiming disability elements of Universal Credit has increased by 383% presents an entirely misleading picture to the public."

UK use of predictive policing is racist and should be banned, says Amnesty Exclusive: rights group says use of algorithms and data reinforces discrimination in UK policing

The head of Amnesty International UK claims in this Guardian article that "The evidence that [predictive policing] keeps us safe just isn’t there". But that's simply not true.

Let's look at what the best-available evidence on predictive policing shows …

🧵

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Illegal working activity since 5 July 2024

How does publishing data this way help inform the public?

Lunchtime data: www.gov.uk/government/p...
Evening data: www.gov.uk/government/p...

...there was a new figure (19k returns!) and a press release embargoed until 1700, when a new "data" publication arrived.

The 16.4k covered data up to the end of Dec, which will be made available, in full, scrutinisable detail later this month. Same can't be said for the 19k.

Fig 5 here bit.ly/4aWJ3Qj are the most recent proper data (to Sept 2024).
Most of the figs in yesterday's Home Office comms blitz were not accompanied by proper data.
We got a press release overnight (16.4k returns) with "data" the next day at lunchtime. But by then..

Home Office Tweet. Text says "Through our Plan for Change, we have removed almost 19,000 people including failed asylum seekers, foreign criminals and immigration offenders from the UK since July 2024."

Screengrab of Home Office stats showing that the single largest category of returns are "other verified returns": people who left the country of their own accord and whose departure was discovered later by the Home Office.

Pretty poor stats from UK Home Office yesterday.
Firstly, misleading to say 19k people were removed. Most "returns" (this stat) are people who left voluntarily, most often those who left of their own accord and whose departure the Home Office only discovered later when (e.g.) checking visa data.

The number of penalty notices issued to parents for taking their children on family holidays has hit a record high, according to figures released today by the Department for Education. There were just over 443,000 penalty notices issued for unauthorised family holidays in the 2023/24 academic year, up by a quarter on the previous year and the highest number since records began in 2009/10. This has pushed the total number of penalty notices issued for unauthorised absence in the same academic year to 487,344, an increase of 22% from the previous year and also the highest number since records began in 2009/10. Penalty notices are issued to parents for failing to ensure that their child attends school. In 2023/24 they were for £60 if paid within 21 days of receipt rising to £120 if paid after 21 days. If the penalty is not paid within 28 days, the local authority must either prosecute for the original offence or withdraw the notice.

school absence fines (mainly for unauthorised holidays) up by a quarter to record levels.

explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statist...

The image shows a series of six line graphs depicting the trends in global emissions of different pollutants from 1750 to 2022. The title reads "The world has passed 'peak pollution'," indicating that emissions of several pollutants have declined since their peak levels, except for ammonia. The pollutants shown are: - Sulphur dioxide (SO₂) – peaked in the mid-20th century and has since declined. - Nitrogen oxide (NOx) – followed a similar pattern, peaking around the late 20th century and then dropping. - Carbon monoxide (CO) – peaked mid-20th century and declined. - Black carbon (BC) – shows a rise until recently, followed by a drop. - Organic carbon (OC) – has risen steadily with a recent plateau. - Ammonia (NH₃) – continues to rise without a recent decline.

The world has probably passed “peak air pollution”

Line chart showing the number of planning applications received, granted and decided in England. All three have been trending down fairly steadily in recent years.

Another record low in planning applications submitted and decided in England.

www.gov.uk/government/s...

YouTube video by Sky News Long-term borrowing costs hit new high | Ed Conway analysis

🚨How worried should Rachel Reeves be about rising bond yields?
😨How worried should the rest of us be?
😱And is this a repeat of 2022 (or even worse)?
After all, UK 30yr govt bond yields are now at the HIGHEST level in more than a quarter century.
📽️My 4min explainer👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mDx...

Line chart showing UK unemployment rate

Bar chart showing quarterly growth in UK GDP

Harder to see a 'crash' in the sense of an immediate recession or a spike in unemployment.

Line chart showing the interest on two- and five- year fixed rate mortgages rose through out 2022, spiked after the mini-budget before returning to trend by about April 2023.

Easy enough to see a sharp, temporary spike in mortgage rates in the months just after. That would have affected hundreds of thousands of people looking for mortgages (out of millions with mortgages).

Line chart showing the cost of UK government bonds in the week around the Truss/Kwarteng mini-Budget. After months of steady, gentle rises, rates picked up sharply on Thursday after the Bank of England announced interest rates. They then picked up sharply again on Friday after the mini-Budget and again by more on the Monday morning when markets opened.

Here's what happened to the price of government borrowing in the week of the mini-Budget. The BoE announcement had an effect. So did the mini-Budget. So did Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng saying there was "more to come" that weekend.

Bar chart showing average number of homes delivered in English councils and the new targets they are expected to meet. For example, Kensington and Chelsea delivered around 240 new homes a year over the last three financial years. Their new target is more than five thousand homes a year.

Some local councils in England will need to *quintuple* new housing delivery to meet government targets.

Analysis - plus postcode lookup for your council at www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is fab.

As featured on Rest is Entertainment our @moreincommonuk.bsky.social polling of how Brits favourite Christmas films breakdown by voting intention. Labour holds landslide leads with fans of Elf & the Grinch. Tories storm ahead with Love Actually and Reform are ahead by 5 points with fans of Scrooged.

API icon by adizas/clean png

What's your favourite #API for government #OpenData in 2024? And why?

(Asking for a friend... Examples from anywhere in the world welcome!)

How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States? To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States. The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then. However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone. What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population? The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout. This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third. This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990. This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

As well as the policy stuff, this is good on how to read “is X too high or too low” survey data.