Author Description

Whitaker's Concise 2017 is the definitive reference guide to the UK. The concise edition is a UK-centric gold-mine of information with enormous breadth of coverage. At half the price of the standard edition the reader with an interest in UK facts and figures is really getting value for money. The concise edition contains a comprehensive explanation of every aspect of national and local government infrastructure in the UK, astronomical and tidal data for 2017, guides to UK law, education and taxation, overviews of the water, energy and transport industries, essential calendar information, chapters on royalty and peerage, Defence, MPs, government departments and public bodies - quite simply, the UK in one volume! Our dedicated team of both in-house editors and specialist contributors spend a total of 6,000 hours, updating Whitaker's annually – this includes contacting over 5,000 people to update their own organisation's details, researching information from official annual reports, and gathering statistics and facts from the most up-to-date authoritative sources available. For last year's edition, one editor spent an entire day contacting individual departments of HM Treasury to ascertain the correct name of each minister's Private Secretary – information which is just not available elsewhere, including the gov.uk website. Of the 6,000 hours spent updating Whitaker's annually around 2,000 hours of editorial time is dedicated to verifying every piece of information to ensure that, unlike collaborative online sources such as Wikipedia, all the material in Whitaker's is neutral and reliable. Completely revised and updated every year at least 50% of the contents are newly compiled specifically for this edition. 'If you want to know it... it's here' John Humphrys