WIREDGOV

The publication of the population in custody figures for July 2009 has been postponed.

The Ministry of Justice was scheduled to publish the monthly figures on Friday 28 August. Due to technical problems, the Head of Profession for Statistics has taken the decision to delay publication of this bulletin and, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, has written to the National Statistician to explain the reasons for delay.

In May 2009, the National Offender Management Service began roll-out of a new case management system for prisons (Prison-NOMIS). The system has been successfully deployed to 30 prisons. However, data collection issues have emerged that need addressing to ensure a high quality data feed for the statistical bulletin.

Headline weekly management information using a manual work-around is still available and details of the overall prison population can be found on the Prison Service website.

At present we believe that this suspension of the monthly bulletin is liable to affect publication of end of August data at the end of September and possibly future publications as well. A further announcement will be made when we can give a definite timetable for resumption of this series.

There are three other statistical documents planned for publication on Friday 28 August 2009:

• end of custody licence releases and recalls
• prison population projections
• consultation on offender management statistics.

These will all be released as scheduled at 9.30am as they are unaffected by this issue.

Any enquiries should be directed to:

• press and media enquires – Ministry of Justice Newsdesk – 020 3334 3536
• statistical enquiries – email.