Dear Joan,

Thank you for your email of 15 September 2022, notifying the UK Statistics Authority of the extended pre-release access to the ‘Perceptions of the Youth Justice Agency: Findings from the 2018/19 and 2019/20 Northern Ireland Safe Community Surveys’ publication. This was in accordance with the Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics Order (NI).

We appreciate, following the announcement of the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, there was a need to change the publication of these statistics from Friday 9 to Monday 12 September, which led to an extended period of pre-release, as recipients were already in receipt of the official statistics prior to date of publication being changed.

We support your judgement that, in these exceptional circumstances the public benefit from the extension of pre-release access significantly outweighed the detriment to public trust in official statistics likely to result from such extended access. We are pleased to note that an explanatory note has been added to the published pre-release access list: this supports transparency for users.

Yours sincerely,
Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation