What this is for
About
People argue about whether things in Britain are getting better or worse, usually with numbers that nobody present can check. This site exists to put the actual figures somewhere they can be looked at.
Cutting through the noise
An enormous amount is said about what governments do. Most of it is speculation, briefing, reaction and argument, and almost all of it is gone within a week. Underneath that there is a much smaller and much duller set of facts: what things cost, how many people are waiting, what was collected in tax, what was spent, and how those figures compare with before.
That is all this site is. It strips out the commentary and the noise and leaves the numbers, because the numbers are what actually describe the situation. They are less exciting than the argument about them, and they are considerably more useful.
It will sometimes be dull. That is rather the point.
What we do
We gather published data from independent official sources, the Office for National Statistics, the Bank of England, NHS England, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and others, and present it so that periods can be compared honestly. Every figure is quoted with the source it came from and a link to it. Nothing here is our own measurement, and nothing here is a number you cannot go and verify.
The aim is to make it possible to take an objective view. Not to tell you what to conclude.
What we do not do
- We do not colour numbers good or bad. Indicators show direction only. Whether a rise is welcome depends entirely on which indicator it is, and that judgement is yours. The only place a pass or fail appears is the pledge tracker, where a government set a target and either met it or did not.
- We do not draw conclusions. Where context genuinely helps, we add commentary explaining what was happening, and that commentary is sourced like everything else and clearly marked as commentary.
- We do not smooth over broken comparisons. This one matters most, and it is explained below.
- We do not track you. No analytics, no advertising, no cookies for advertising, no third party scripts, no fonts loaded from anyone else's servers. The site makes no requests to anywhere except itself. Nothing about your visit is recorded or shared.
Why comparisons are harder than they look
Official statistics change definition over time. Unemployment has been redefined many times. The consumer prices index did not exist in the United Kingdom before the 1990s, and the retail prices index that preceded it is calculated differently and runs higher. The current NHS waiting list measure began in 2007. Crime has two different official sources that do not agree, and recording practice changed materially in 2014.
This means a line drawn smoothly from one decade to another can quietly claim something untrue. It looks continuous because it was drawn continuously, not because the thing being measured stayed the same.
Where a measure changes, we mark it and explain what changed, rather than presenting the two sides as like for like. A comparison we decline to make cleanly, with the reason given, is more useful than a tidy chart that misleads.
Governments, parties and leaders
This site treats a government as the mandate won at a general election, running until the next one. That is not always how it is discussed in public, so it is worth being explicit about why.
In the United Kingdom voters elect a parliament, and the party able to command its confidence forms a government. Voters do not elect a Prime Minister. A governing party may replace its leader at any point during a term, through its own internal process, without any election taking place. This is a feature of the constitution rather than an accident, and it happens often: the mandate won in 2019 was served by three Prime Ministers, and the mandate won in 2024 has had two so far.
Manifesto commitments are fixed at the election. They are promises made by a party to win a mandate, so they belong to that mandate and to the whole period it runs for. They do not reset when a party changes leader, and they are not the personal undertakings of whoever happens to hold office when they are measured.
So the pledge tracker on this site is attached to a manifesto and a parliament, not to a Prime Minister. Where indicators are compared across a government, the comparison runs from the start of the mandate to its end, whoever was leading at either point.
Comparing periods that are not whole governments works differently, because a calendar or financial year can begin under one government and end under another. In those cases the site shows which governments held office during the period and for how much of it, rather than crediting the whole period to one of them.
Where this is going
The dashboard currently shows one fixed comparison, covering the Starmer government from July 2024 to July 2026. That is the starting point, not the destination.
The intention is to let you compare any two periods you choose, whether that is two governments, two decades, or any pair of dates, across as long a run of history as the data honestly supports. Money will be adjustable for inflation so that older figures can be read in today's terms, and shown as a share of the economy or per person where those are the more meaningful comparison. Where a definition changed in between, the site will say so.
Some indicators have good records going back to the 1940s. Others genuinely begin in 1997 or 2007. Where there is no data, the site will say there is no data rather than showing a gap that looks like a zero.
Getting it wrong
We will make mistakes. When that happens we correct them and say what changed, rather than quietly editing the number. Dated snapshots of the data are kept so that what the site showed on any given day can be checked later. If you have found an error, please see the corrections section.