Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, for not having risen earlier, but I wanted to check something that the Minister said about the hub. Although I got his letter on Saturday, I have not had a chance yet to commit it to memory. He said that the board would be responsible for the development and oversight of the central hub, including the development of guidance on the content of national statistics releases. This brings us back to an old argument about national versus other statistics. Noble Lords will remember that at Second Reading a number of noble Lords referred to the fact that NHS waiting list statistics produced on a quarterly basis were national statistics and those produced monthly were official statistics. If the hub is to concern itself about how NHS waiting list statistics are produced and issued, it will have to look at both national and official statistics if the official ones are also of significant public interest. I was therefore pleased when the Minister said that the attachment to his letter was guidance for the board, and it would be for the board to decide exactly how to interpret the guidance. It was not intended to be absolutely writ in stone, as it were. The board, in its management of the hub, will have to deal with some of these tricky issues about statistics, some of which will not be national statistics. The Government have given us their reason for objecting to the amendments that your Lordships’ House agreed to: "““Because it is for the Statistics Board to decide””." It is not; it is for us to decide. We decided that these are very important issues that we wanted to put in the Bill. We did not want to give the Statistics Board any scope for not looking at these things, and we also wanted to stiffen its resolve to regard this as being near the top of its list of responsibilities. While it is useful that the Government tell us that the Bill allows the board to do this anyway, they have not come up with a shred of an argument against including this in the Bill, other than that they do not want to. There is no substantive argument against what is proposed, because they, like us, accept that these are important things that the board should be doing. It therefore seems sensible to be straightforward, put the provision in the Bill and give the board a clear mandate to do these things.