Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill today. We have had a good debate. I hope that he has got the message that your Lordships’ House is not 100 per cent happy with the Bill. All noble Lords have rightly referred to the crucial issue of public trust in statistics. If I mark out just one contribution, it is the thoughtful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, on the different aspects of trust fitting together. I make no apology for returning to that issue. It is a fact that public trust has declined and we should be clear that politicians must bear most of the blame for that. I do not dispute that some of this occurred on our watch. In 1997, the Labour Party pledged in its manifesto to create an independent statistical service. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, pointed out, once in power it did not do so. Instead, it launched a decade of spin, which has made the position very much worse. I plagiarise an aphorism about liberty: "““Trust lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it … While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it””." Put simply, law itself cannot create trust. The Bill will not of itself restore trust, but it may create an environment in which trust can again flourish. When we scrutinise the Bill, we will have one test for every clause and subsection: is it the best way to achieve the highest degree of public trust? It will not be enough that it simply improves the situation. We shall actively seek ways of doing it even better. If we get these judgments right, we shall have created the possibility that trust in statistics will return. However, if we do not get them right, there will probably not be another legislative opportunity for a couple of decades, as the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Chorley, pointed out. We will bear a very heavy burden in scrutinising the Bill. We are clear that the Bill in its current form does not give our statistical arrangements the best possible chance of restoring and then maintaining public trust. I shall outline the areas in which we shall seek change during the Bill’s passage through your Lordships’ House. I start with the scope of the Statistics Board’s powers and the nonsensical distinction in the Bill between official and national statistics. The Bill allows the Government to decide which of their statistics are to be tested against the code for national statistics. They will be allowed to publish statistics that do not meet the rigours of the code. I cannot think of anything more inclined to entrench the lack of trust that we are trying to reverse. The public will not carry nice distinctions between national and official statistics in their mind. These are all government statistics and will be tarred with the same brush. We cannot let the Bill retain that distinction. The writ of the Statistics Board must clearly and unambiguously run across all statistics. A closely related issue, about which many noble Lords have spoken at length, is the pre-release arrangements. The Bill reserves those to the Government with no role for the Statistics Board. The Minister will recall that the MORI survey carried out in late 2005 showed that 59 per cent of people thought that the Government used figures dishonestly and that only 34 per cent thought that government figures were accurate. That is the mountain that we have to climb and it is why the pre-release arrangements will need radical change. The Bill appears to give control over pre-release to Parliament through the approval of a statutory instrument setting out the rules. My honourable friend Mr Michael Fallon described the proposed arrangements as, "““giving batsmen the ability to decide whether the leg before wicket rule should apply to them””.—[Official Report, Commons Public Bill Committee on the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, 23/01/07; col. 170.]" We all know that affirmative instruments give the appearance of parliamentary power, but in practice, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, pointed out, they act an elaborate rubber stamp for the Government's views. Parliament would have no power to initiate changes if the arrangements set up by the order proved not to work in practice. A purist response would be to give Ministers no pre-release access and hence open up no possibility of abuse. However, we agree with several noble Lords—in particular, the noble Lords, Lord Turnbull and Lord Dearing—that it is a legitimate role of government to make effective policy responses. In our society, that is what is expected. But at present the Bill positively prohibits the Statistics Board from getting involved in pre-release. We are very clear that the Statistics Board must be given the leading role in pre-release arrangements. More important, if the pre-release arrangements do not work well in practice, we need a flexible mechanism for changes to be made. Let us suppose, for example, that a ministerial team abused the pre-release access that they had been given. That is not fanciful. The Statistics Board should be able to decide in that case that different arrangements for those Ministers and their department are to apply in future. Statutory instruments cannot do that. They cannot be used with either the precision or the speed that may well be needed. Under the Bill, it will be left for the Government to initiate changes, but they have the most to gain from abusing the system. The third area in which we find the Bill deficient is the status of the National Statistician. We have a vision of a strong and independent National Statistician with a remit that runs across the whole of government. The Bill does not give the National Statistician any powers outside the Statistics Board. He has no formal role across Whitehall or the devolved Administrations. Other aspects of that include access to the Prime Minister, which I know the noble Lord, Lord Moser, valued when he was our leading National Statistician. The Bill needs to enhance the National Statistician’s role. Alongside that, we need to consider the role of the National Statistician and the governance arrangements that are being set up. It is proposed that he will become a member of the new Statistics Board, but that board will have a chairman who may himself become the face or the story of statistics. When I asked the Financial Secretary at the helpful briefing meeting that the Minister arranged what sort of role was envisaged for the chairman, I was told that that was regarded as a very significant job. That may reassure the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, but if the chairman is himself or herself a big beast in the world of statistics, there must be questions about who will be the public face of statistics in the UK and whether the National Statistician’s role is enhanced or diminished by the arrangements. There is also the issue of confusion of roles under the Bill. My noble friend Lord Eccles made a powerful contribution on that subject. As others have pointed out, the board produces and publishes statistics under Clause 18, but under Clause 8 the board monitors the production and publication of statistics. Which is it? It cannot be both. Under Clause 3 the National Statistician is a member of the board, but under Clause 28 he is the board's principal adviser—which I think means that he advises himself. There are similar confusions with the role of the head of assessment and his position with the board vis-à-vis the National Statistician. We must look very carefully at the BBC precedent cited by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who has a different view of the applicability of the BBC precedent, will be able to join us in Committee when we will debate that. My noble friend Lord Goschen raised the question of disputes about statistical decisions taken by the ONS—for example, in the classification of Network Rail. Those ambiguities about roles will represent no improvement on the current position in getting a satisfactory response to those difficult issues. We also want to look carefully at the role of the Treasury, whose fingerprints are all over the Bill. The Treasury is involved in appointments to the board and in removing people from the board—and, of course, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has extensive powers of direction. The Treasury will be setting the budget of the Statistics Board, as the Chancellor did in last week's Budget. We do not believe that five-year budget settlements are any substitute for non-Treasury influence on the budget-setting process. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said about that budget-setting arrangement. If the Statistics Board is under-resourced, the quality of statistics will drift down, as happened following resource constraints in the 1980s. As night follows day, trust will ebb away. Whether the solution is a role for the Cabinet Office, which has attracted a lot of support today, or for Parliament is a question that we must debate in Committee. Whatever the answer on money, my noble friend Lord Jenkin rightly raised the issue of parliamentary scrutiny and the role of your Lordships' House. I hope that we can get more clarity about that as the Bill goes through later stages. A large part of the Bill deals with the use of information by the board. My noble friend Lord Northesk drew out some important issues here. We understand the desire of statisticians to use data to generate powerful statistics, but we are wary of increasing powers through the use of gateways without commensurate controls or restrictions. As my noble friend Lord Northbrook pointed out, there are important links between the confidentiality protections and the issue of public trust. In Committee, we will want to strengthen those clauses. In another place, many of those issues were rehearsed in detail, but the Government did not listen. They still have their parliamentary majority in the other place and they do not have to listen. Only small changes were made to the Bill. I hope that the Minister will take away two clear messages from today's debate. The first is that your Lordships' House is committed to ensuring that trust is restored to a national statistics system. We support the Bill, but only because it is a step in the right direction. The second is that we will be mounting a strong challenge to the detail of the Bill as it proceeds through your Lordships' House. There are major issues here that strike at the heart of whether trust will be restored and maintained. We shall be ruthless with those parts of the Bill that do not maximise that potential.