User engagement on ‘Lone Pensioner Allowance and Disabled Person’s Allowance’ annual publication

Overview

Land and Property Services (LPS) Statistics Branch is consulting on the future of the Lone Pensioner Allowance (LPA) and Disabled Person’s Allowance (DPA) statistics.

The LPA and DPA statistics provide information on the number of applications, awards and net amount awarded for each rating year, including a breakdown by Local Government District. The publication was developed for internal stakeholders to assist with monitoring, planning outreach activities and for financial planning.

LPS proposes to discontinue publishing this as an Official Statistic for the following reasons:

• As per the Code of Practice we continually review our publications to ensure they remain relevant to users. A recent review of the LPA & DPA publication, including web analytics, highlighted it is of very low interest.
• Due to pre-release access legislation and restrictions on providing data which will be part of an Official Statistics publication prior to publication, we have been unable to provide data to internal colleagues on occasion. This is contrary to the original intent of the data, which was for internal use and business planning.

LPS will instead continue to publish the data as management information on Open Data NI annually within a few weeks of the end of the Rating Year, which provides all of the data that is published as part of the Official Statistics report. The data on Open Data NI can be found at -

Lone Pensioner Allowance Statistics – Open data NI

Disabled Person’s Allowance Statistics – Open Data NI

Why your views matter

LPS would welcome your views on the proposed changes and how these may affect you.

The survey should take no longer than five minutes to complete.

The consultation will close on 17th December 2024.

To support transparency in our decision-making process, a summary of the responses to this consultation and any action taken as a result of the user engagement will be published on the LPA and DPA statistics webpage.

What happens next

After the consultation closes, we will consider the responses we receive to decide on whether to implement the proposed changes.