ABSTRACT
In recent years the nature, quality and accessibility of the information base in the UK has become a key issue of debate among’research workers and decision-makers in business and local and central government. Concern about deterioration in the information base, particularly official statistics, was fuelled by the implementation in the early 1980s of the R&yner Review of the Government Statistical Services (Rayner 1980). In the late 1980s and early 1990s discussion over the accuracy and integrity of government statistics became more widespread. The Social Science Forum (SSF 1989) established a campaign for improvements to be made to government statistics and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS 1990) published an influential report entitled Official Statistics: Counting with Confidence. Debates also took place in Parliament (e.g. on the problems with statistics on unemployment and the National Accounts), on television (e.g. Channel 4 1989), and in the press (e.g. Waterhouse 1989a* b). The issues raised in these debates also apply to the important subset of UK information sources with which this book is concerned, namely those available for local and regional studies of economic activity and land use. This introductory chapter attempts to give a context for the subsequent chapters by reviewing the main features of the information base, the ways in which it is changing, and recommendations to improve it
