Dataset details: CRDA/8/DS/4

CRDA/8/DS/4 was transferred along with CRDA/8/DS/3 and CRDA/8/DS/5 to NDAD by the Court Service on 9 floppy discs which were received on 4 September 2001. The look-up tables court, fpclu , fpclu2, judgcode and psdla were received on 27 September 2002.

CRDA/8/DS/4 contains data collected between 1 January and 31 December 1999 by the Court Service, a continuation of the series begun in datasets CRDA/8/DS/1, CRDA/8/DS/2 and CRDA/8/DS/3. It relates to the criminal and civil business of those courts in England and Wales for whose administration the Lord Chancellor is responsible. It also covers the work of some associated offices including the The Public Guardianship Office (PGO) previously known as the Public Trust Office, The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and certain tribunals. The PGO is the administrative arm of the Court of Protection and part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Established on the 1st of April 2001, it took over the mental health functions previously undertaken by the Public Trust Office (which also included the work of the Court Funds Office and Trust Division). The data includes routine monthly returns from courts throughout England and Wales, plus some information gathered on a sampling basis taken at intervals throughout the time scale. It forms the basis of all the business assessment and planning of both the Lord Chancellor's Department and of the Court Service, and is the latest method of storage and retrieval of the judicial statistics, pending the development of a new system.

Information contained in the system is gathered from forms and notes used in collecting the various statistical datasets that form the Judicial Statistics database: these forms are available for consultation via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue. The information provided in CRDA/8/DS/4 is similar to that of CRDA/8/DS/1, CRDA/8/DS/2 and CRDA/8/DS/3, however some new files have been added, while others are no longer used.

New tables include st10a99 which replaces stats10a.

The files were output from a Dataflex database by staff at the Court Service, and copied to floppy disk for transfer to NDAD. All the files were in comma-separated format and required no conversion other than translation of the end-of-line characters between the DOS and Unix standards.

This dataset and related dataset documentation are open to the public, with the exception of the field 'JUDGE_NAME' [CRDA/8/DS/4/1/4:2], located within the table 'Judges' ID' (judgcode) [CRDA/8/DS/4/1/4]. Under Section 40 (personal information defined within the meaning of the Data Protection Act 1998) of the Freedom of Information Act, this field will remain closed for 60 years. Data is available for browsing on demand by users of NDAD and does not have to be booked in advance.

Documents relating to CRDA/8/DS/4 have been transferred to NDAD and can be consulted via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue

CRDA/8/DS/4 comprises 67 tables. Tables court, judgcode, psdla, fpclu and fpclu2 are look-up tables for codes used in other tables. Relationships were inferred between court, psdla, judgcode and fpclu lookup tables and all the tables which include the fields court_code, psd_code, judge_code and fpc_code respectively.

The dataset comprises the following table(s):

The contents of the dataset were checked to ensure that fields defined as containing date or integer values did so, and that in the few cases where a range of values was specified for a field, its contents were in this range.

Many tables contain columns clearly identified as spare fields (e.g SPARE1, SPARE2) which have been preserved, although it is unlikely they contain any meaningful data. They are used by the Court Service in case of incorporating future fields within a table.

Table 4 ( judgcode ) has 17 records with invalid entries ('SS', 'MO', 'M') in the JUDGE_CIRCUIT field.

The records in the tables that can not join with the lookup table court are:

Table 20 ( civbus ) has data in all the fields designated as 'SPARE' and 'NEW_FIELD'. Table 36 ( stats11 ) has 1389 records out of 5821 that are not joining with the lookup table psdla through the field PSD_CODE. It seems that more PSD_CODE values are available in this table than the psdla lookup table provided by the Court Service. Table 57 ( stats10 ) has 199 records out of 10490 that are not joining with the lookup table judgcode through the field JUDGE_CODE.

The sources used to describe the data are various. For st10a99 in this dataset (see Scope and content ) descriptions in NDAD are based on copies of forms, or other authoritative information provided by the department. For all remaining cases, information on which the table descriptions are based has been taken from a variety of sources, chiefly original forms and additional information provided by the Court Service, and table and field descriptions for the preceding Judicial Statistics datasets in NDAD. Users of this dataset should note the limitations in the descriptions provided by NDAD, and therefore in the extent of validation that could be performed

Several other tables have clearly evolved from tables in the previous year's dataset, usually by the addition of new fields (though in some cases the new fields contain only blank or zero values). We have used table descriptions from the previous year as far as possible to describe these data tables, but in many cases have been unable to provide complete and authoritative descriptions for the new fields.

All files had their line-ending codes (record separators) transformed from the MS-DOS to the Unix standard (see Digital processing and conversion) : this has no effect on the data contained therein. The number of records and fields were compared, and no inconsistencies were found. Spot checks were carried out to verify that the sum of individual numeric fields in the original tables were the same in the transformed data; no discrepancies were found.