ABSTRACT
For a long time, the issue of public information management has been sidelined and neglected in Britain. The knowledge of data sources and their strengths and limitations has become the expertise of a minority group of consultants, academics and government statisticians. It is, therefore, so refreshing to see that the Better Information report from the Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Team 18 confronted the problem:
Many commentators were impressed by the number and quality of the statistics that back up the report [the 1988 report on deprived neighbourhoods]. They might have been surprised to know how difficult it was to pull the information together from a series of disparate and often incompatible sources.
(SEU 2000: 7)