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 reported in Construction Output and New Orders (Construction), produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

This report forms part of a broader assessment of short-term economic output indicators produced by ONS. Assessment reports 278 and 279 examine GDP: Preliminary Estimate and Indices of Production and Services; and Retail Sales statistics.

The previous assessment of these sets of statistics was reported in Assessment report 170 , published in February 2012. The report covered two separate statistical reports – Output in the Construction Industry and New Orders in the Construction Industry. Before designation as National Statistics was confirmed, ONS moved to publishing the combined Construction Output and New Orders covered by this re-assessment. Noting that the statistics ceased to be published in their previous form from September 2013, the Assessment Committee decided that the Authority would formally close the earlier Assessment and await the outcome of the current re-assessment of all ONS’s short-term economic output indicators before making any further judgment about Code compliance.

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.

 

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Ed Humpherson to Jonathan Athow, March 2019