Accredited official statistics

The Code emphasises the importance of ensuring that official statistics continue to be relevant and should be stopped or changed where needed to ensure that official statistics best serve the public good. This is true for all official statistics, whether or not they have been accredited. To appropriately meet the standards of the Code of Practice, it is important that producers of accredited official statistics (called National Statistics in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007) remain vigilant to identify the opportunities to improve the statistics where appropriate.

The use of official statistics in development provides an excellent means of demonstrating innovation and improvement, while at the same time showing how the statistics can be appropriately used and understood, with producers then using that knowledge to feed back into the development.

Where accredited official statistics are redeveloped, they would be relabelled as ‘official statistics in development’ after receiving the agreement of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). Under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 the accreditation can only be removed with the approval of the regulator. At the end of the project, OSR would conduct a compliance review, to confirm compliance with the Code and that the accreditation can be reapplied.