Criminal justice social work statistics in Scotland: 2015-2016

Annex C: Consultation and accreditation

C.1 A working group involving data providers and other internal/external stakeholders was formed in early 2010 as part of a Scottish Government review of criminal justice social work statistics. The group met during 2010 and 2011 and agreed to collect unit level data for community payback and drug treatment and testing orders from 2012-13 onwards, data which is now helping to provide better information on the process and outcome of these orders. Consideration will also be given in the future to improving statistics on the use of throughcare.

C.2 The statistics collected on criminal justice social work have a wide range of uses. They contribute to policy development, as well as the monitoring and evaluation of policy implementation. They provide information on local authorities' workloads in terms of criminal justice social work activity and inform central government funding allocation. Keeping in regular contact with local authorities is also advantageous as this enables the Scottish Government to ensure it is kept up to date on matters which affect implementation and delivery. Meetings of the Local Authority Social Work Statistics: Criminal Justice ( LASWS: CJ) group are held twice a year to discuss relevant data collection and other matters.

C.3 Some examples of how these data are being used include:

• determining annual funding allocations for community justice authorities / local authorities.
• supporting local authority workload planning exercises, performance management and the allocation of staff resources
• assessing the uptake of specific preferred options in criminal justice social work reports
• benchmarking demand on local authority service to compare how different authorities operate.

C.4 The statistics in this bulletin have been designated as National Statistics. Under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, the UK Statistics Authority has a statutory responsibility to conduct periodic assessments to ensure compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. Criminal justice social work statistics were assessed in 2011 and the National Statistics designation confirmed (assessment report 128 is available at https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/archive/assessment/assessment/assessment-reports/).