Statistics and Registration Service Bill

Perhaps I may make two brief points. The Minister has not responded to or commented on the main argument for the move to the Cabinet Office, which is the co-ordination argument. He has failed to recall that we are dealing with a decentralised system, so how can one argue that the Treasury, as one of the key consumers, would be a less biased head than the Cabinet Office? However, my real reason for speaking again is to address the Minister’s seemingly powerful point that this is such a minor issue that it does not warrant such an apparently major attack. I shall come clean. When the whole idea of the transfer was first mentioned, I had many opportunities to hold talks with Treasury officials and Ministers, and I was impressed by the idea of a board which was going to have total responsibility. However, the more I talked, the more I realised that the Treasury was going to hang on to quite a lot of the so-called residual responsibilities, some of which have entered the drafting of the Bill and some of which have not. The longer that went on, the more I realised that the Treasury—I am not talking about funding—was intent on remaining a powerful head of the whole operation. That is when I became fairly keen on trying to get it moved back to the Cabinet Office.