Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I am pleased about the general welcome that has been given by both Opposition parties to the progress that has been made. I wish the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) had not described that progress as retreat, capitulation, and an about-turn, and that she had not issued press releases that talk about U-turns. It does not encourage the Government to think about being more flexible during the parliamentary process when as soon as they employ such an approach they are treated to such epithets. I prefer the interpretation of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) and his welcome for the considerable progress that has been made. If the hon. Lady used that type of language, we might be able to make even more progress in coming to a consensus on the important matters that we are discussing. Being accused of retreat, capitulation and about-turns does not always encourage the Government to listen to debates in the way that they ought. I ask the House to resist the hon. Lady’s amendments to the Lords amendments for reasons that I will come to shortly. Instead, I ask the House to support the amendments from the other place, which clarify the Government’s intention on the question of scope of the application of the board’s code of practice and compliance with it. Those amendments will enhance the role of the board in the assessment process—an issue to which the hon. Lady rightly referred. The amendments from the other place are aimed at addressing a number of concerns about the coverage of the statistical system that will be established by the Bill and will clarify and further underscore the Government’s intentions as regards a number of matters relating to the code of practice. They will also address the issue of official and national statistics, which I believe will add even more transparency to the new statistical system we are creating. Our approach reflects the desire that the definitions used in the Bill should serve the statistical system and all those who use its outputs well, both now and in future. As such, the Government are concerned to ensure that the Bill includes as broad and as flexible a definition of ““official statistics”” as possible. I ask the House to consider the fact that legislation on statistics was last enacted in 1947. Now, 60 years down the line, we have another scintillating Bill, which hon. Members have spent many hours considering, so it may well be prudent to try to future-proof the Bill in case it takes another 60 years to get another legislative vehicle before the House that we can use to change or improve our statistical systems. That is why, in their definition of national and official statistics, the Government have tried to future-proof the Bill, rather than to narrow it and make it inflexible. There may not be many other legislative vehicles around in which we can iron out any inflexibilities that we inadvertently leave in the Bill, hence the wider definitions that feature in it. Until the Bill, there had never been a legal definition of ““official statistics””, and there is no agreed international definition, so at the start of the Bill-drafting process it was not immediately clear what the best way was of defining the term. Initially, it was thought that it could be defined as Government Statistical Service output, but the Government wanted to avoid a definition that would unnecessarily limit the role envisaged for the board, given developments in statistical production, activity in Government, and the need to anticipate what might happen in the next 60 years. Members of the Government Statistical Service are no longer the sole producers of statistical information within Government, and many of the key statistics that the public use to judge the Government’s performance come from administrative sources. The Government therefore concluded that the definition of ““official statistics”” should be as wide as possible, and should include all statistics produced by the 200-plus Government Departments and agencies, the devolved Administrations and"““any other person acting on behalf of the Crown””." Such a definition meets our goal of being both very wide and future-proof. As we opted for a very wide definition, it was necessary for us to focus and prioritise the application of the formal assessment against the code. That assessment is established in clauses 12 and 13. The Government’s aim is to help to ensure that greater resources are devoted to those statistics that have relatively greater importance. That is where the idea, raised by the hon. Member for Twickenham, of a rough hierarchy comes in. When it comes to the question of what is a national statistic and what is an official statistic, many hon. Members have had good fun with the inconsistencies around the edges. At the weekend, I read about egg bulletins and all sorts of other things that I had not realised existed. But clearly, in general, there is a rough hierarchy and it is possible to identify the most important statistics to represent properly what is going on in the country’s economy and socially. It is fairly easy to see what they are, and I am glad the rough hierarchy has been recognised in the House. It is important that we allow the new board to prioritise which areas it should consider for assessment first. If the board were legally bound to undertake formal assessments of the vast and ever expanding range of official statistics, that would not be a sensible way forward, in view of the likely resource implications both for the board and for those being assessed. I expect that added credibility will come from securing independent endorsement of the quality and integrity of a set of statistics. The code of practice has a special role to play in relation to the assessment of national statistics, but the Government have always intended—I am glad to clarify this through the Lords amendments—that the code of practice should be used across all official statistics, at least as a guide to best practice, to allow an assessment to be made of statistics in the official pool, rather than the national statistic pool. Amendments Nos. 11, 16, 18, 31 and 39 will change the name of the code to the code of practice for statistics. The change is aimed at making that intention more explicit, clarifying that the code applies not only to national statistics, but to the broader range of official statistics. The Government have decided that the legal name for the code should be the code of practice for statistics, which expresses succinctly and clearly exactly what the code is for. As we heard, Opposition Members tabled amendments in lieu of the amendments from the other place, which would alter the name again, to the code of practice for official statistics, which I must resist. As I have just said, the code will be applied across official statistics, but will have a particular role in relation to national statistics, as the code against which the board will assess statistics to determine their compliance, and whether or not to award national statistics status. Calling it the code for official statistics may be confusing and could imply that it refers only to those official statistics, and not to the subset that are national statistics.