Our Data Analyst and Publication Lead, Dave Jones, explains our approach to statistics at the Welsh Revenue Authority.
As a tax authority, collecting and managing Welsh taxes, our services are used by people in Wales and beyond.
We’ve actively helped people to file tax online since we started operating in April 2018. By now, almost 99% of tax returns are filed digitally.
As a result, we can use the data we hold digitally to help inform our decision-making around tax services. We know this has a direct impact on the people we serve.
Our first annual statistics
We’re also a publisher of official statistics, like other government organisations, and take a transparent approach to publishing.
We’ve made significant progress in developing ours since we published a story on the Data and Analytics team last autumn.
We’ve been publishing monthly and quarterly statistics for Land Transaction Tax (LTT) and quarterly statistics for Landfill Disposals Tax (LDT) since April 2018.
In the summer, we published the first annual statistics for both taxes. Our annual LTT statistics included new breakdowns and analysis within Wales:
- by local authority
- by Assembly Constituency
- by level of deprivation, using the Welsh Index of the Multiple Deprivation (WIMD)
Making our statistics accessible
Earlier in the year, our statistics moved to the new Statistics and Research pages on the GOV.WALES platform where we host our webpages.
We began publishing our statistical releases as accessible HTML Document webpages. For example, the latest quarterly releases for LTT and LDT.
We believe this change makes the statistics easier to use and understand.
Open data on StatsWales
In the summer, we launched new open datasets for LTT on the StatsWales website. This gives users of our statistics more detailed data than before.
This includes the geographic data we published with our annual LTT statistics, and data for built-up areas published recently. We’ve also published a dataset for LDT.
Interested in statistics?
We would like feedback from anyone using our statistics. If you do:
- how do you use them?
- do they meet your needs?
- how can they be improved?
- how can further analysis be added to them?
Contact us: data@wra.gov.wales