Is your local school under-performing and your nearest hospital a death trap? Once upon a time, the only way to find out was via the local rumour mill. No longer: today we can turn for answers to the plethora of statistics, league tables and targets produced by government departments.

Or at least, that is what government ministers would have us believe. In reality, the reputation of governments for massaging official statistics has undermined trust in what should be a reliable source of insight into the effectiveness of their policies. As a recent survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed, most of us are happy to trust the raw data: it is the idea of the data being "cooked" by ministers that we find unpalatable.