Compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics

Official statistics published by the Planning Inspectorate are produced in accordance with the UK Statistics Authority’s Code of Practice for Statistics and regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). As such, the production of our statistics is required to adhere to the Code’s core standards of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value, as outlined below. You are welcome to contact us directly with any comments about how we meet these standards.

Trustworthiness

Show integrity

Our statistics are produced by members of the Planning Inspectorate’s Analysis Service. These members are dedicated to behaving impartially and conducting objective analysis without any political or other external influence. Any decisions that need to be made in the production of our statistics are explained clearly in the Background Quality Reports accompanying each release.

Only those members of staff strictly needed in the production of these statistics are permitted access before this time, in addition to a limited number of approved ministers and officials who receive pre-release access for briefing purposes 24 hours in advance.

Lead responsibly

All our official statistics releases, revisions and corrections are subject to the approval of the Head of Profession for Statistics at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. All our statistics are produced by members of the Government Statistician Group (GSG). This statement of compliance with the Code of Practice forms part of our commitment to leading responsibly.

Be transparent

Our statistical releases are publicly preannounced on the GOV.UK website 12 months in advance and always released at the standard time of 09:30am on a weekday. Our pre-release protocol, as outlined above, including the list of ministers and officials who receive pre-release access, is listed at Statistics at Planning Inspectorate.

Where any need for corrections or revisions is identified, these will be published at the soonest possible time and clearly explained, in accordance with our revisions and corrections policy, which is currently under review and will be uploaded soon.

Users can always contact the production team at statistics@planninginspectorate.gov.uk, and we provide this email address with every release. We have made the decision to publish all responses to Freedom of Information requests, as they relate to statistics, to ensure greater transparency, on the GOV.UK website.

Manage data responsibly

The Planning Inspectorate is committed to compliance with UK data protection laws. All data are stored in secure systems with appropriate access controls, and all staff are comprehensively trained in data protection. We publish a Customer Privacy Notice, detailing policies related to the collection and management of personal information, and a data management policy for statistics, which is currently under review and will be uploaded soon.

Quality

Prioritise quality

We apply careful quality control to our statistics and aim to continually improve the way we collect data and perform analysis. We work closely with operational colleagues who originate the data to understand the nature and quality of our source data. We assess the quality of all our official statistics using the European Statistics System (ESS) Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) and publish our assessment in a background quality report accompanying each release, as outlined in our quality management approach, which is currently under review and will be uploaded soon.

Be rigorous

We aim to use reproducible analytical methods in the production of all our statistics, ensuring consistent and accurate processing. The statistics draw from source data that is originally collected primarily for administrative reasons, rather than with reporting in mind, and therefore may be subject to completeness, validity and accuracy issues. We work with colleagues in operational and data management roles to understand any issues with the data, continually find ways to improve the data quality, and perform validation and quality assurance.

Be open about quality

We publish a background quality report accompanying each statistical release that explains our sources and processing, highlighting any potential issues in data quality and outlining what steps we take to mitigate them. As stated in the Be transparent section we will clearly highlight and explain any corrections or revisions that are made to official statistics.

Value

Be relevant

Our statistics are designed partly in response to requests for information from the media and the public, and as part of the Planning Inspectorate’s commitment to transparency. We encourage any feedback on our statistics provision and welcome any suggestions for further useful outputs. In each official statistics release, we explicitly invite users to contact us with a view on “what content would be most useful and why”.

Be clear

We use clear headings and labels to aid understanding of the published data, with accompanying explanations where considered necessary to increase understanding and reduce the risk of misinterpretation or misuse. Our statistical quality assurance and sign-off procedures assess our releases include as a core principle the need for simplicity and clarity. We continually review the formats of our releases to identify where we can make changes to improve the clarity of the data.

Be accessible.

Our statistics are published freely and openly to all on our GOV.UK website. We aim for our statistics to be accessible to as wide a range of users as possible. We provide detailed summaries and explanations to accompany the statistics, graphs and tables in our regular releases, as well as full tables of casework volume statistics in excel format, which can be downloaded easily and used for any appropriate purpose, for example research or journalism.