Valuing John Harrison’s work – how much is that £20,000 longitude reward worth today?

John Harrison is famous for inventing the marine chronometer as his answer to the problem of finding longitude at sea, for which Parliament had in 1714 offered a reward of £20,000. One of the odder questions with which the ONS media relations office was recently faced was how much that would be worth today?

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Understanding the extent and nature of child abuse

Child abuse is an appalling crime against some of the most vulnerable in society. It’s something that’s not often discussed or well understood, and there has been a lack of complete statistics. The Office for National Statistics has been working to produce the most comprehensive picture possible by incorporating questions into the Crime Survey for England and Wales and analysing this alongside other sources of data, which can only tell a partial story. Here Meghan Elkin explains how bringing data sources together helps us better understand both the nature of child abuse and the potential demand on support services.

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