Dear Mr Rennie

I am writing about correspondence the UK Statistics Authority received in relation to the First Minister of Scotland’s reply in the Scottish Parliament to your oral question on 17 September. The First Minister said that “around 40 per cent of the care homes around the country now allow and enable indoor visiting.”

Based on data subsequently set out in an FOI response[1] this figure seems to be a very loose approximation based on incomplete data and referring to both indoor and outdoor visiting. Some health boards either had not supplied figures or did not know the figures and these represented a significant proportion of the care homes in Scotland.

Ed Humpherson, the Director General of Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority has today written about this to Roger Halliday, Chief Statistician at the Scottish Government.[2]

Yours sincerely,

 

Sir David Norgrove

[1] https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202000089350/

[2]  Ed Humpherson to Professor Roger Halliday: Proportion of care homes in Scotland allowing and enabling indoor visiting