This is one of a series of reports prepared under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 . The Act gives the Statistics Authority power to re-assess whether the Code of Practice for Official Statistics continues to be complied with in relation to official statistics already designated as National Statistics. The report covers the sets of statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and reported in: UK Trade UK Trade in Goods by Classification of Product by Activity CPA (08) (UK Trade in Goods by CPA)

The previous assessment of these sets of statistics was reported in Assessment report 45 in May 2010. On 14 November 2014 , the UK Statistics Authority removed the National Statistics status from UK Trade after the National Statistician alerted the Authority to errors in the expenditure estimates for UK residents’ visits abroad and overseas residents’ visits to the UK contained in the statistical release . The Director General for Regulation considered, given this error, and an error in data supply that occurred earlier in the year , that a full re-assessment against the Code was appropriate.

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.