My phone’s just beeped to tell me how many steps I’ve taken since breakfast and how that compares with trends over the last month. Next to that is a graph about what rubbish my children are playing on their tablets. And I’m just a tap away from a real-time analysis of my domestic energy use (spoiler: it’s July and I’m out at work – it’s zero).

Never before have we been surrounded by so much information – or as many tools to make sense of it. And, yet, as the volume of data that swirls around us has become ever more vast, it doesn’t always feel like our depth of understanding has increased commensurately.

As a case in point, take the new study by the Centre of Local Economic Strategies (CLES), commissioned by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and published last week. This finds, sadly if not entirely unexpectedly, that the publicly available data can’t tell us how much local authorities are actually spending with local or small firms.

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Scotland dismisses the self-employed at its own peril

The problem isn’t that councils don’t have the raw data. They’ll know who they’ve paid and for what. Rather, the issue is all the gaps and inconsistencies in the way they record their spending.

Some are, for example, shakier on how big a supplier is or whether or not they’re........

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