Statistics and Registration Service Bill

At the outset, I want to put it on record that I welcome this group of amendments. Throughout the debate, the Opposition have expressed concern about the complicated institutional structure established by the Bill. We have pointed out that the Bill blurs the function of the national statistician with that of the board, which gives rise to three concerns. First, it creates confusion as to who does what and who accounts to whom. Secondly, vesting production and scrutiny functions in the same institution, the board, gives rise to conflict of interest problems, which could undermine confidence in the new system. Thirdly, it gives insufficient weight to the importance of the role of the national statistician and fails to give sufficient detail on what that role should involve. Again, we welcome the Government amendments, which are a step in the right direction. We appreciate that this is a difficult issue to get right, and there are various structures around the world covering how statistical offices operate. The amendments flesh out the Government’s underlying idea that the production functions attributed to the board will be carried out by an executive office headed by the national statistician. Essentially, the executive office will carry out the role now broadly performed by the ONS. The amendments give greater clarity to the separation of functions within a unitary board structure, providing for a clearer delineation between the production functions as the remit of the national statistician and the executive office and the scrutiny and executive functions, which will be carried out by the head of assessment. As with the other Government amendments that we have considered today, a number of issues are still unresolved. We remain concerned about the blurred lines of accountability in relation to the new structures. The board will still act as judge and jury where a complaint is made about the production of ONS statistics or statistics that are currently produced by the ONS. Where a complaint is made about a decision made by the national statistician or her executive office, the complaint will be made to the board. In a very real sense, however, the board will have been responsible for the decision in the first place, which raises the danger of undermining confidence in the board’s ability to take an impartial decision on whether the complaint should be upheld, particularly where it decides to back the judgment of the national statistician. If the chairman of the board were to rule against the national statistician and issue a rebuke, he would be in the embarrassing position of issuing a rebuke to himself as the chairman of the body responsible for the decision in the first place. We also worry that the loss of the independent watchdog, with the merger of the statistics commission with the ONS, will remove one of the existing safeguards in our statistical system and could be seen as a step backwards in the quest that the Opposition and the Government share to secure independent statistics in which people can safely place their trust and confidence. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the incredibly valuable work of the Statistics Commission since its establishment in 2000, and I also pay tribute to the work done at the ONS. The Government have never satisfactorily explained how the national statistician can be chief executive of the board, when a major function of the board is scrutiny and assessment, in which we all accept that it would be inappropriate for her to be involved. We continue to regret the Government’s rejection of our amendments, which would have made it plain that the national statistician is chief executive of the executive office and not chief executive of the board as a whole. The Government have not adduced an example of a structure genuinely comparable to the one that they are establishing. As the then Financial Secretary more or less admitted in Committee, we are in uncharted waters as far as the model chosen by the Government is concerned. We can only hope that the quality and abilities of the board and the national statistician can develop what Baroness Noakes described as ““successful workarounds”” in making the new framework operate successfully. Lastly, I want to repeat on record that I wish that the Government had taken this opportunity to articulate and strengthen the role of the national statistician. After all, as the Exchequer Secretary has said, statistics Bills do not come around very often. I do not know whether it will be another 60 years before this House again has the chance to discuss official statistics, but it could be some time before there is a major reform of the statistical system. It is unfortunate that the Government have missed this significant opportunity to encode in statute some important functions for the national statistician. These include providing co-ordination and planning of our decentralised statistical system, which it so desperately needs, and the vital task of providing the professional leadership that government statisticians need. When Ministers or policy officials try to push them around or misuse or spin their statistics, the statisticians need a heavyweight figure to back them. The success or failure of this reform in restoring trust in official statistics is inextricably linked with the status and authority not only of the board but of the national statistician. Although it does not have the highest profile, few issues are more important than the health and integrity of our statistical system. Without accurate data on the state of our economy and our country, we can neither hold the Government to account nor take well informed policy decisions. Without accurate statistics, the policymaker is in effect like a doctor left unable to take his patient’s temperature or blood pressure. Partial or misleading statistics leave Government and citizens alike groping in the dark and can lead to serious mismanagement of critically important decisions for our nation’s future. That is why independent statistics are a key part of modern economic governance, and that is why they form a key part of our triple lock to entrench macro-economic stability in this country. I hope that the reforms will help to remedy an increasingly serious lack of trust in official statistics which has intensified during the 10 years this Government have been in office.