Review of Justice Social Work Statistics in Scotland – survey of users 2023

Stakeholders’ meetings

A number of stakeholder meetings have taken place over the last year to discuss justice social work statistics and there was feedback from regular meetings with Scottish Government policy teams about the data. There were a number of suggestions on how to improve the use of justice social work statistics:

• timing of the publication brought forward to support Community Justice Strategy.
• the need to change some of the evidence collected to support changes within social work from different policy areas within the Scottish Government.
• more requests on the possibility of data linkage exercises using justice social work statistics and other justice statistical datasets.
• need to change the data collection to reflect changes in policy and new legislation.
• more data on www.statistics.gov.scot to support analysis

A separate workshop for Local Authority Social Work Statistics : Justice (LASWS:J) was held in March 2023. This covered the questions in the survey and discussed justice social work statistics in general. A lot of the points have already been covered in the free text notes but there were some additional items to consider:

• would like to see deprivation analysis, linked to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.
• provision of more 10-year time series, especially at local authority level.
• data linkage between health and justice data.
• issues with downloading data from www.statistics.gov.scot, which seems overly complicated - support needed.
• would like to see third sector organisation data used.
• increased use of uploading data to the Local Government Data Platform.
• uploading the aggregate data returns using ProcXed.net.
• data standards and definitions could be clearer and not just in the guidance material.
• more detail on how some of the statistics are calculated.

The above will be reviewed to see if any progress can be made on them.