You asked

Question 1
Please provide name and amounts of revenues reassigned to and from the regions to Greater London or any other? (Including the £500m of Air Passenger Duty (APD) which you have reassigned away from region South East to region 'Greater London' / London).

Question 2
When do you intend to publish 'Country and regional public sector finances' to reflect the actual revenues raised in each country and region of the United Kingdom?

Question 3
At which level of management was the decision taken to reassign away from Region South East APD of £500m?

Question 4
Do you consider your publication 'Country and regional public sector finances' passes all O.N.S. quality and integrity checks?

Question 5
When do you intend to reassign back to region South East revenue from Gatwick Airport?

We said

Thank you for your request.

Please see our responses to your questions as follows:

Question 1:
We do not reassign revenues to and from NUTS1 regions. Revenue for Air Passenger Duty and other taxes for NUTS1 regions are derived based on the ‘who pays’ principle. This principle is based on identifying the location where the revenue is raised, that is, the location of the individual or enterprise that bears the tax burden. When allocating to regions, we look for indicators or other data that can provide a regional representation of the tax base. This is then used to allocate UK revenue to regions. As an example, Value Added Tax (VAT) is allocated to regions using data from the Living Costs and Food survey. Further information is available in our methodology guide.

Question 2:
We expect to publish the next country and regional public sector finances in either December 2019 or January 2020 as we are bringing forward our publication timescales. These statistics will continue to follow the 'who pays' and 'who benefits' principles.

Question 3:
As explained in response to your first question, we do not reassign revenues to and from NUTS1 regions but rather we apportion the total UK APD revenue to regions and countries in accordance with our published methodology.

Question 4:
The country and regional public sector finances are described as experimental statistics. Experimental statistics are statistics that are within their development phase and are published to involve potential users in building a high-quality set of statistics that meet user needs. An Experiment Statistics label does not mean that the statistics are of low quality, it only signifies that the statistics are still being developed.

Question 5:
We value feedback provided by users on our methods and consider this feedback in future publications, including your feedback on APD. We cannot confirm if or when we will make further changes to APD, but where we make future methodology changes these will be clearly highlighted.