Field name changes
In order to conform to the requirements of publishing STATS19 data, which is a National Statistic, on
data.gov.uk, some changes have been made to the structure of STATS19 raw data tables. This involved standardising field names to consistent standards across all published data – which inevitably involved those who work with the data in revisions to established applications which rely on it. Of course, this included MAST. These changes were one factor which led to delays in this year’s update. We apologise for this inconvenience, but we expect that this issue will be a one-off which is unlikely to arise in future.
Geography changes
For decades, the location of STATS19 crashes have been assigned to local authority areas using a set of three digit codes maintained by DfT. This year, for this first time, this changed and the old geographical codes are now obsolete. Crash locations are now specified using standard nine character alphanumeric codes specified by ONS. While this change is a wise move going forward in order to future proof the data set, it did necessitate substantial changes to MAST’s import and processing routines, which has inevitably caused delays. However, MAST users can rest assured that, as a result of this work, the geographic data held in MAST remains as robust as ever. We went through the pain of implementing the new codes so you didn’t have to!