But the sales picture is more complex than the headline figures suggest.

There's more to the unemployment data than the headline figures.

Nowhere near headline figures but well enough that they've kept it alive.

The details on the polling are even worse than the headline figures.

But behind the headline figures there were signs that not all shops are suffering.

The headline figures are also being published on the staff intranet each month.

I believe that the headline figures need a little unpacking, in order to understand some of their implications for real people.

Here's a breakdown of how the key concepts and how those headline figures are reached.

Less understood and more interesting are the staggering variations that exist underneath these headline figures.

First we can see the headline figures on the vote, the referendum motion was defeated overwhelmingly by 483 votes to 111.

Here is the Office for National Statistics release with the headline figures.

Underlying the headline figures, construction contracted most, and at the same rate as the UK as a whole.

Looking at the polling beneath the headline figures, it is clear that the present Tory boost is not sustainable.

The headline figures show:

(Pledge tracker has itself been revamped for the coalition's first anniversary to show these headline figures as soon as you open it up.)

"However prepared the market is for the possibility of painful P.P.I. and C.P.I. numbers, it will still wince when the headline figures hit," he said.

We analyse the headline figures, deconstruct the ideological battles and political manoeuvering, interview the key players, and record the drama of the Commons speech or the cuts rally.

Headline figures are 200bhp from a turbodiesel engine combined with an electric motor in the rear axle giving four-wheel drive, only 99g/km of CO2 and up to 80mpg.

But headline figures showing that gas and electricity prices are being cut by 5pc disguise the fact that the biggest energy suppliers are not reducing prices across the board.

The British Crime Survey is out today, so Simon Jeffery Jeremy Lennard is number-crunching to tease out the headline figures.

For while the headline figures need to be qualified in various ways, one thing is undeniable: this is the best piece of economic news that President Obama has received in many a moon.

Outright sales were down on what was a pretty dim quarter a year ago, but at least the headline figures enabled John Akers to make his characteristically jaunty statement with a little more justification than of late.

Until then we can look at the ONS figures in more detail as, along with the headline figures, the ONS provided a detailed breakdown of the teen pregnancy rates across the country.

A change over such a short period, and, in some of the cases Goodall investigates (including the headline figures), of just three or four percentage points, could arise from a short-term fluctuation caused by something other than economic growth.

It's not so much the headline figures, which have been well covered in the Times and elsewhere: 46 million Americans living under the poverty line in 2010, the highest number since the Commerce Department started collecting the figures back in 1959.