Scottish Statutory Debt Solutions Statistics: Annual edition

Experimental statistics label

Experimental statistics are a type of official statistics that are undergoing development. In this new publication, the experimental statistics label has been used with the aim for compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. These statistics are currently being developed and have been published to involve users and stakeholders in their development, and to build in quality and understanding at an early stage.

Section 6.1 of the 2007 Statistics and Registration Service Act defines official statistics as statistics produced by the UK Statistics Authority, government departments (including executive agencies), the Devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, any other person acting on behalf of the Crown or any other organisation named on an Official Statistics Order.

Under the Act, official statistics should comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics and fall within the scope of the Office for Statistics Regulation, which assesses their compliance against the Code of Practice.

Further information on the standards of official statistics in Scotland is available here - About our statistics - gov.scot.

The exact publication date will be pre-announced through a 12-month release calendar, giving a specific release date at least four weeks in advance where practicable – Official statistics: forthcoming publications - gov.scot

Development work programme

Over the next year, a work programme to continuously evaluate and improve the existing output will be carried out. More specifically, the work programme for will focus on three areas: User needs; Completeness of the data collected; Quality assurance processes.

Part of the aim of this publication is to engage with users and potential users of our statistics in order to assess the suitability and value of the statistics released. Users are central to the statistics that AiB produce, and we want to ensure that key information about each of the statutory debt solutions is easily accessible and valued. Therefore, we are seeking your feedback on this publication, to improve the product and better support our user base. Please do get in touch with us via email and/or via our anonymous online feedback survey and we will share this with our stakeholders. No information about particpants is collected without their explicit consent.

Currently, all statistics for the financial year 2021-22 and 2022-23 are included in this publication. Some statistics for earlier years up to 2015-16 are also included. AiB is continuously working on improving the quality and completeness of this statistical publication. The major limitation to this work is that statistics are derived from administrative systems owned by AiB. Some of these systems have been long decommissioned, and some records are permanently deleted according to AiB’s data retention and destruction policy. Hence, the data for earlier years is limited. We will include estimates for early years if these are available during the work programme.