Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I thank the noble Baroness for allowing me to speak at this point. I have no problem with the bureaucracy here; it was just that partly because of my age it took me some time to get up to the Public Bill Office. I was therefore a bit late, but never mind. I support the amendment, which would give the residual roles for Ministers to the Cabinet Office rather than to the Treasury. It is an important issue and I assure Members of the Committee that I am not governed by nostalgia. I do not regard my days as golden—they were interesting—but this issue is relevant to the purposes of the Bill; namely, independence from Ministers and trust, to which we keep returning. We need to remind ourselves of what we are talking about: the residual roles. The main roles performed by Treasury Ministers in the past are to be transferred to the new Statistics Board. We have all welcomed that publicly and in your Lordships’ House. It is to be a non-ministerial department that will report to Parliament. Everybody has welcomed it including the Royal Statistical Society, the Statistics Commission and your Lordships. Equally, everybody has recognised that there will be some so-called residual roles. They are not major. Some appear in later clauses to do with what happens if the board is responsible for some failures in operation. There are also questions about appointments, who lays the report before Parliament, PQs and other matters. There are a number of residual responsibilities, which are all that we are talking about. I shall say a word about the historical background. Noble Lords probably know that the Central Statistical Office, which was the origin of official statistics in this country, was set up by Winston Churchill in 1941. That great man had wisdom in that, as in everything else. First, he placed it squarely in the Cabinet Office. Secondly, he was clear that the real issue at that high time of the war was linking statistics coming from different departments—the role of co-ordination. That is why he put the Central Statistical Office in the Cabinet Office, and that is why I think that the residual responsibilities should be there. In my day, and for long after—until 1989—the statistical service reported to the Prime Minister via the Cabinet Secretary. I speak from experience of three Prime Ministers when I say that that was a very helpful situation for the statisticians. Several times— twice in my period in office—the Chancellor tried to take us over. It was resisted for reasons that still apply today. There is no antipathy to the Treasury in anything I say; I simply think that it would make more sense in view of the Chancellor’s vision in leading us down this route of independence if the Statistics Board ended up under the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office. My main points are few. First, we have a decentralised system, and we are sticking with it. It inevitably keeps coming up in our debates. The system is different from those in most other countries where all statistics come from a single statistics office, which makes life much simpler, not least in keeping a distance from politicians and on the key issue of trust. We do not have that system, and it is right that we do not. I used to argue for the decentralised system. I still do, and I am very pleased that in these reforms, it remains. It means that at the centre we have the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for all the key economic data: GNP, unemployment and much else, including population figures and other macro data. It is a key office, and it comes under the Chancellor and the Financial Secretary. However,80 per cent of all statistical series come out of other ministries: education, the Home Office, health, environment. That is where most of the most sensitive figures come from, and where there is most need for improvement and governance of some kind. In passing, I shall say that my suspicious mind has some doubts about whether the Bill has the backing of the Government, as opposed to the backing of the Chancellor and the Treasury—I hope the Minister will reply to this because it is relevant not only to this issue but also to much else that we are discussing. I say this because there are one or two issues in the Bill where I sense the hand of ““hanging on”” from departmental Ministers. We will come to them later: one is national statistics and the other is pre-release. I would like to be reassured that independence—which was the Chancellor’s invention, and all praise to him—is meant to apply for all government statistics. It means independence from the Secretary of State for Health, the Secretary of State for Education, the Home Secretary and so on. I need some reassurance on that. That query is relevant to this amendment because the real argument in favour of the Cabinet Office as opposed to the Treasury is that the Treasury is a major and very important consumer of statistics: about20 per cent of all statistics, but very important ones. On the whole, even for the residual responsibilities, which are all that is left for discussion, I would rather have the Cabinet Office as the ultimate authority—the department in charge—because it is not a consumer of statistics. I cannot think of a better department. The Treasury is a major consumer of data—although only 20 per cent—so there is always the risk of distorting priorities in what is done in the statistical system. It may be less of a risk in reality than in perception, but it is certainly a risk in perception. People will find it harder to accept that we have really gone down the road of independence if a major consumer has responsibility for statistics. My second point also goes back to Winston Churchill. As we have a decentralised system, it is crucial that the residual responsibilities should be placed in a department that can deal easily and neutrally with co-ordination across all the departments. I regard our statistical system as a single whole. It is spread, but all the bits fit together. As was said at Second Reading, the national accounts that come out of ONS are totally dependent on all the other departments. Finally, I shall describe how the system works. I speak from experience when I say that the department with responsibility for the residual matters has two enormous advantages if it is the Cabinet Office. First, it has the advantage of co-ordinating across all the departments. I used to find it very easy, as did my successor chief statisticians, to link from the base of the Cabinet Office with fellow Permanent Secretaries throughout the departments when issues were at stake. The fact that we were the neutral central department, not the Treasury with which all departments have different relationships, made it very simple. That is at official level. I hardly need to say that it was an enormous advantage, with all the respect I can muster to past and present Chancellors, that my ultimate boss was the Prime Minister. Not only did I have had access to the Prime Minister—that is obvious and in the Bill in a different clause—but it was seen publicly and, above all, throughout Whitehall that the Prime Minister was ultimately in charge. That, incidentally, was very real. I would see the three Prime Ministers I served fairly regularly, probably once every three or four weeks and I often had contact with them in between. These were real responsibilities. In the present situation, we are talking about minor final responsibilities and we are talking more about the public vision and perception of independence, and therefore trust. It is enormously helpful if, for example, there remains a problem with waiting list statistics or crime or migration statistics, the Chief Statistician and the board have behind them the Prime Minister—and I suspect that the next Prime Minister will feel this quite strongly as a necessary responsibility. So for those basic reasons—first, that the Treasury is a main consumer, and, secondly, that from the point of view of co-ordination and keeping the whole system under integrity and control—I think that the Cabinet Office is to be much preferred. I hope that the Government may decide to take the final responsibility back to where it used to be.