Statistics and Registration Service Bill

We shall talk about these matters in detail as we consider the difference between the Lords amendments and the Government’s wish to overturn them in order to maintain a situation in which pre-release access may be decided by Ministers rather than the board. The fail-safes in the Bill will lead us to a pre-release system that is transparent, consistent and widely understood by those who are interested in using statistics in the political world, the economic world and the world of policy and lobbying. Before the Lords amendments, the Bill provided an extremely robust and clear version for pre-release, which I believe that we should maintain. The Government’s proposals will ensure that Ministers determine by way of order the rules and principles relating to pre-release under the new system. That will not give Ministers a free hand in the matter. In fact, it will put in place for the first time a system aimed at allowing a greater role for Parliament in scrutinising the content of and compliance with the new pre-release arrangements set out in the Bill. Those arrangements will be distinguished from those issues contained in the board’s code of practice, which will be backed by statute. Unlike the content of the broader code of practice, the new pre-release arrangements that we are suggesting will require the consent of Parliament, or the legislatures in the devolved Administrations, before the secondary legislation comes into force. My predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (John Healey), suggested on Second Reading that we should have an affirmative resolution statutory instrument to put this system into place in secondary legislation.