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 authority3 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 following sets of statistics produced by the Department of the Environment Northern Ireland (DOE):
• Northern Ireland Environmental Statistics Report (ESR)
• Northern Ireland Local Authority Collected Municipal Waste Management Statistics; Annual Report (MWM Annual)
• Northern Ireland Local Authority Collected Municipal Waste Management Statistics; Provisional Estimates (MWM Quarterly)
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 Head of Assessment’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.
ESR is a compendium report comprising the re-presentation of previously published statistics alongside a small number of new statistics. 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. Those sets of statistics will normally be subject to separate assessment. 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 Assessment Committee on behalf of the Board of the Statistics Authority, based on the advice of the Head of Assessment.