Dear Mark

Thank you for your letter of 22 May 2024 detailing the findings from the compliance review of the statistics in development from the Winter Coronavirus (Winter CIS) Infection Study, England and Scotland.

We welcome the findings of your review, in particular the recognition of the innovation and agility of the analysis, the transparency of our processes and the joint, collaborative working with the Office for National Statistics.

We recognise the importance of engaging with users of statistics, as you have highlighted, and we continue to regularly engage with them to ensure our outputs remain valuable and relevant. For instance, we took part in the recent Health and social care statistical outputs consultation, and have recently run user engagement surveys for our flu and COVID and COVER publications.

We agree on the importance of collaborating with the devolved administrations to facilitate UK wide coherence where possible.

As we discussed, we are in the process of submitting papers on our methodology to relevant journals, and we look forward to the scrutiny this will bring. We have submitted two papers to date and continue to draft a number of others with the aim of submitting for publication.

UKHSA’s core aim is to keep all our communities safe, save lives and protect livelihoods, and so using a range of dissemination methods is key to our approach to communicating statistics. We welcome your recognition of the effectiveness of this approach. In line with statistics good practice, we pre-announced the publication of the subsequent ad hoc statistics in our research and statistics release calendar.

It was a pleasure to work with you and your team on this review, and we look forward to continuing to engage with you on future reviews.

Your sincerely

Victoria Obudulu