This is one of a series of reports prepared under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 . The Act allows an appropriate authority to request an assessment of official statistics against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics in order for them to gain National Statistics status. This report is in response to such a request. The report covers the sets of statistics referred to in this report as driver and vehicle statistics, produced by the Department of the Environment Northern Ireland (DOE) and reported in:
• Driver, Vehicle, Operator and Enforcement Statistics – Annual (Annual Driver and Vehicle)
• Driver, Vehicle, Operator and Enforcement Statistics – Quarterly (Quarterly Driver and Vehicle)
Section 3 of this report adopts an ‘exception reporting’ approach – it includes text only to support the Requirements made to strengthen compliance with the Code and Suggestions made to improve confidence in the production, management and dissemination of these statistics. This abbreviated style of report reflects the Director General for Regulation’s consideration of aspects of risk and materiality. The Assessment team nonetheless assessed compliance with all parts of the Code of Practice and has commented on all those in respect of which some remedial action is recommended.
Assessments of compendium publications against the Code of Practice relate to the processes involved in preparing the publication, rather than in producing the statistics that are included. The National Statistics designation relating to the compendium is not automatically conferred on any of the constituent series. Those sets of statistics will normally be subject to separate assessment to attain National Statistics status, but in some cases a compendium publication may include other statistics where this is helpful context. Designation of a compendium publication as National Statistics therefore means that the producer body has, for example: identified and met user needs in terms of the content of the publication; considered the appropriateness of each series for inclusion; and written appropriate commentary.
This report was prepared by the Authority’s Assessment team, and approved by the Regulation Committee on behalf of the Board of the Statistics Authority, based on the advice of the Director General for Regulation.