Under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 , the UK Statistics Authority has a statutory function to assess sets of statistics against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics , with a view to determining whether it is appropriate for the statistics to be designated, or to retain their designation, as National Statistics. Each Assessment is published in an Assessment report . Several hundred sets of statistics already have National Statistics designation, by virtue of the legislation, and each of these will be subject to formal assessment in the period 2009-2012.