The Households Data Hub: Free Charts and Figures for Journalists

UK furniture retailer Furniture in Fashion has published a households data hub for journalists that deliberately contains no statistics of its own. The company's research editors argue that authoritative household numbers already exist in public, published by named bodies including the Office for National Statistics through its Families and households releases, the English Housing Survey, HM Land Registry and the Met Office, and that reporters should take those figures directly from source rather than through a retailer. What the hub offers instead is the part of a homes story that is rarely documented anywhere useful: free to reuse specification tables covering standard UK bed sizes, dining capacity per person, chair and walkway clearances, seat heights, worktop and stool heights, wardrobe hanging depths and desk depths. The retailer states plainly that it does not commission survey fieldwork and will not present its own commercial data as national insight, because it describes customers rather than the country....