This is one of a series of reports prepared under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 . The Act requires all statistics currently designated as National Statistics to be assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics . The report covers the set of statistics reported in Guardianship under the Mental Health Act, 1983 (Guardianship), produced by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). Although Guardianship was designated as National Statistics before the Statistics Act came into force – that is, they were ‘legacy’ National Statistics – they were not included within the first round of Assessment. At that time HSCIC made the case for their exclusion because it anticipated substantial changes to the statistics following a review and consultation that were underway.
1.1.2 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.
1.1.3 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.