Ministry of Justice

Statistics publication update

09 October 2009

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An update on the population in custody bulletin, the delay of statistics publications due in November, and plans to improve the timeliness and reliability of the reports.

Population in custody bulletin

The monthly population in custody bulletin has not been released since the publication of June 2009 data on 31 July 2009 due to technical problems relating to the supply of data for statistical purposes. Headline weekly information on the prison population has been published weekly as usual throughout this period using manual workarounds.

There are five main tables in the bulletin:

  1. population in custody by type of custody and sex
  2. population in prison by offence: remand and immediate custodial sentences
  3. young population in prison by type of custody and sex
  4. certified normal accommodation and population by sex and establishment
  5. population in prison by nationality and sex (published quarterly).

Workarounds have now been established for some of the issues, but we are still unable to provide the principal offence and sentence length data (affecting Tables 1 and 2). A similar version to Table 4 is still published in the weekly publication of statistics (monthly edition).

Our proposals given this are:

  • From the publication of the October data, to once a month provide Table 1 (excluding sentence length) and Table 3 in one of the weekly population in custody releases (monthly edition) which is still being published. Table 5 will be included similarly once a quarter.
  • To resume the full publication in April 2010.

Update on statistics publications due in November

The Ministry of Justice has pre-announced, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, that the following publications would be released in November 2009:

Since announcing these dates, we have encountered data quality issues which are taking longer to resolve than originally thought. These issues relate to the number of summary offences recorded.

We will therefore be delaying publication until January 2010 of all three publications to allow sufficient time to resolve these issues.

The publication of quarterly provisional sentencing statistics bulletin is unaffected by these issues as it focuses only on indictable and triable either way offences and excludes summary offences.

In line with the Code of Practice, the Chief Statistician has written to the National Statistician to explain these delays.

Improving the timeliness and reliability of statistical publications

While delays to statistics publications will occur from time to time, we are keen to ensure that we publish all our statistics on the date and time pre-announced on every possible occasion. Recent delays to some of our key statistical publications have been a matter of concern and the Chief Statistician has reviewed what actions are needed to minimise the risk.

As a result, we will:

  • place direct management responsibility for all Ministry of Justice staff producing statistical first releases from our administrative data sources with the Chief Statistician
  • ensure that all business change programmes take full account of the need to produce robust, timely and relevant statistics so that continuity of statistics is managed alongside the delivery of the business benefits
  • hold a series of training events for staff involved in all aspects of the process to ensure best practice is shared.

As the Chief Statistician is required to supply annual reports to the National Statistician we will update on progress through these reports.

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