About

Measure What’s Important (UKMWI) publishes UK official data with its provenance chain intact. It is operated by Adapt Progress Evolve Limited, a software company registered in England and Wales.

What it is for

A great deal of UK public data is genuinely open and genuinely hard to use. It arrives as a spreadsheet inside a zip, or an Access database, or a portal that will not give you a stable URL. The figures are public; the usable form is not.

This site takes a small number of those datasets and publishes the part that is hard to get at, as tables you can read, sort, cite and download — with the source release, the fetch date and the licence attached to every one. We would rather do a few of these properly than many of them thinly.

How it is produced

Data is fetched from the publisher, checksummed, archived, and loaded into a database that records which release every figure came from. Pages are generated from that database on every build. The collection and publishing are automated; the methodology, this page, and every editorial judgement are written by hand.

There is no language model anywhere in the publishing path. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a preference: a renderer reading rows is provably consistent with the database, whereas generated prose is only probably consistent, and probable consistency is not a citable source.

What this site will not publish

• No named individuals, in any dataset, at any level of detail.
• No postcode-level pages or downloads. Postcode data is used internally as a join key where a licence permits it, and never republished.
• No figure without its provenance — the release it came from and the date we fetched it.
• No series that silently crosses a boundary change. That is precisely what the change tables exist to make visible.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, that matters more to us than it does to you — the whole proposition is that our numbers can be checked. Write to hello@adaptprogressevolve.com quoting the page and the figure. Corrections are published with the date and a description of what changed. We do not edit a number away silently, because someone may have cited it.

Independence and funding

UKMWI is not affiliated with the Office for National Statistics, any government department, or any other public body. It republishes their open data under the Open Government Licence and says so on every page that uses it. It carries no advertising, takes no sponsorship, and sells nothing. It is funded by its operator as a demonstration of how this kind of publishing should work.