Introduction

The United Kingdom is now a partially federalised state: the administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have powers similar to those of the components of federal states but there is no separate sub-UK administration for England, which contains 85% of the UK's total population of some 65 million. However, within England there has been a partial and incomplete devolution of responsibilities to city regions. The most significant is London with a population of 8.7 million but more recently there has been significant devolution to Greater Manchester with a population of 2.8 million, considerably larger than that of Northern Ireland and close to that of Wales. Further, there are very significant powers of governance at levels below this, including not only local government but also Local Enterprise Partnerships.

In this chapter we will consider the implications of devolution both for the production of statistical information and for the uses, especially the political uses, which can be and are being made of those statistics. The chapter begins with an outline of the history and present constitution of ‘devolved statistics’. There are statistics available for multiple spatial levels and while the smaller nations have their own statistical offices many important data collections are national in form and are the source of key information. This applies even to administrative statistics collected from the operation of government where those operations are not part of devolved powers.

Next we examine the general form of statistics available which can be used to explore national differences within the UK and differences among other political units with significant devolved powers. Here attention will be paid to the most contentious of the statistics relating to national-level devolution, the Government Expenditure and Revenue Statistics (GERS). These are the most intensely political of contemporary devolved statistics because they inform, or perhaps sometimes confuse, debates about the viability of an independent Scotland as a welfare capitalist nation state, the stated objective of the Scottish Nationalist Party, which has governed at Holyrood for much of the twenty-first century. However, the GERS have a wider potential significance since they are the most important set of indicators of the severe economic imbalance in the UK's space economy. This is particularly the case if consideration of them is not confined to the Scottish case but also looks at regional variation within England.