The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from Karen Dunnell, dated 16 January 2007:
As National Statistician I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question asking who is given pre-release access to (a) market-sensitive and (b) non-market-sensitive final statistics. (114832)
Every Department which is responsible for producing National Statistics has published a ‘Statement of Compliance’ with the National Statistics Code of Practice and its supporting Protocols. In each case, their Statement incorporates either (i) a link to, or (ii) guidance on how to obtain, a list which, in accordance with Section 4(b) of the ‘National Statistics Code of Practice: Protocol on Release Practices’, sets out ‘for each statistical release, who is entitled to have privileged early access and for how long’. Annex A of the same Protocol lists which National Statistics have been categorised as ‘market-sensitive’—all of them published by the Office for National Statistics. Copies of the Code and Protocols are available in the Library of the House. The Compliance Statements for all Departments, as well as the list of all those individuals who receive pre-release access to the Office for National Statistics’ releases, can be accessed using the following URL:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/about_ns/cop/compliance.asp