Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I seek the support of the House for the amendments from another place which seek to clarify the roles of the executive office under the national statistician’s leadership and the head of assessment. Before I address the amendments, it may help Members if I remind them of the core governance model adopted in the Bill and why the amendments brought forward from another place help deliver the clarity that we all seek. The Government are committed to the governance structure established in the Bill, in which the single legal entity charged with delivering on the functions contained in the Bill is the statistics board. We believe that a single structure is the most effective way to deliver greater independence for the ONS and independent scrutiny and oversight of the statistical system as a whole, while avoiding the creation of competing centres of statistical expertise. The Bill provides that single institutional structure with a board that is legally responsible and accountable for all the body’s functions. In line with the principles of good corporate governance, the Bill establishes that the board will have a mix of executives and non-executives, although we are legislating to ensure that there will always be a clear non-executive majority. In common with other Departments and public bodies, professionals acting under the board’s direction will, we expect, discharge the executive business. However, the legal authority to act on behalf of the statistics board flows through the board, and the board must therefore retain authority to act in relation to matters for which it is accountable. The question of clarity of roles has nevertheless been a concern in both this House and the other place during the passage of the Bill, and the Government have recognised that the Bill could benefit from the key executive roles being more clearly set out on the face of the Bill. The Bill as drafted, augmented by the amendments before us today, makes it clear that the key functions of the board will be carried out by executives under the leadership of the national statistician and the head of assessment, while the legal entity that is ultimately responsible for those functions is the board collectively. The broad thrust of the amendments is to give even greater clarity to the operational role of the national statistician and the executive office with respect to both the board and the head of assessment. Amendment No. 32 removes the existing references in clause 29 to the executive office, and amendment No. 35 inserts a new clause in their place explicitly to set out those of the board’s functions that will be undertaken by the executive office under the leadership of the national statistician. Those include the development and maintenance of definitions, methodologies, classifications and standards for official statistics under clause 9, the production of statistics, such as the retail prices index, under clauses 18 and 19, and the provision of statistical services under clause 20. The other amendments are designed further to emphasise what has always been our intention—that within the single statistics board structure, there will be a clear separation in the production of statistics under clause 18 from the assessment function established in clauses 12 and 13. That reflects the need to avoid the clear conflict of interest that would arise if a person who was responsible for producing any given statistic also had a role in determining whether, in producing that statistic, the code of practice had been complied with. Clause 30 has been included to ensure that such a situation could not arise, following interventions on the matter in Committee in the other place, where the Government undertook to re-examine the drafting to see whether our intention could be made clearer. The result of that re-examination is this group of amendments, the aim of which is unequivocally to confirm and clarify on the face of the Bill the separation between staff working on the assessment of statistics and those working on statistical production.