Britain's top number-cruncher took some stick from MPS this week. But Len Cook, a feisty New Zealander who has run the Office for National Statistics for three years, is used to it. He told MPS last year that he was "the most abused civil servant in Britain". His difficulties have arisen because a string of controversial statistical revisions have made the ONS look accident-prone. The Statistics Commission, an advisory panel, has now launched a review. Most recently, economic growth figures for the second quarter of this year were revised from 0.3% to 0.6%. That came just after some other extensive rewriting of recent economic history, including a growth figure for 2000 that went from 3.1% to 3.8%.
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