Guidance

FCDO statistics: statement on disclosure control

Published 1 March 2024

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fcdo-statistics-statement-on-disclosure-control/fcdo-statistics-statement-on-disclosure-control

This document sets out the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s (FCDO’s) approach to statistical disclosure control for published statistics.

Statistical disclosure control is a set of methods used by organisations when sharing data to ensure that no sensitive or private information is released whilst making sure the data is still functional for users.

On occasion, FCDO may need to apply methods to published statistics to reduce the risk of any sensitive information being released. Disclosure control at FCDO is used proportionally if it is needed to protect the confidentiality of individuals, our staff and partners, commercially sensitive information or where sharing the statistics could pose a threat to security.

Two main methods of disclosure control are used at FCDO:

  1. Suppression: FCDO may supress a value in a data table to prevent disclosive information being released. In these cases, we may also need to complete some secondary suppression of cells. This means that at least one other value in the data table is also supressed so that the supressed values cannot be calculated through subtraction.

  2. Rounding: FCDO may round values in a data table if some uncertainty around the true values will help avoid disclosure.

Any statistical outputs published by FCDO which have used these disclosure control methods will highlight within their supporting documentation to ensure users are aware.

These methods are in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics (Section T6.4) which says that ‘appropriate disclosure control methods should be applied before releasing statistics and data’.

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