OSR's correspondence and contact with ORR about passenger rolling stock publication

FOI reference: FOI-2024-2377

You asked

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) recently published data bout the age of passenger rolling stock. The information about the data is available here.

When ORR originally published the data, it stated that "Any rolling stock in use as of 31 March 2013 which was still in use as of 31 March 2024 would have aged 10 years..." Obviously there are 11 years between 2013 and 2024.

Having  been challenged about the error, ORR has amended the information on its website, but has advised that "Our view was that, as this did not require a revision to our statistical release or published tables, it did not require a revision note on the blog itself. We confirmed this approach with the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) who agreed the error, and correction, related to an explanatory sentence in the text -- but did not affect the interpretation of these statistics." The ORR's response is available here.

Please provide the OSR's correspondence and contact with ORR about the approach taken in this case.

I have pointed out to ORR that  the Code of Practice for Statistics says: "Scheduled revisions or unscheduled corrections to the statistics and data should be released as soon as practicable. The changes should be handled transparently in line with a published policy."

ORR's approach does not seem to be transparent.

We said

Thank you for your request.

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