Statistics and Registration Service Bill

rose to move, as an amendment to Motion C, leave out from ““House”” to end, and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 12, 13, 15, 20, 67 to 70 and 72, and do disagree with Commons Amendments Nos. 15B and 15C.””. The noble Baroness said: My Lords, throughout our consideration of the Bill, one issue has dominated our discussions: public trust. The well-documented decline in trust in statistics is in no small measure attributable to the way in which statistics have been manipulated or spun by politicians. While spin did not start in 1997, it certainly accelerated in the past decade. The lifeblood of spin and manipulation is access to statistics before they are released. This is partly a matter of the amount of time ahead of official release and partly the number and type of people who have access. At present it is entirely in the hands of the Government, and the Commons disagreements to our amendments would in effect preserve that position. It is our firm belief that the Statistics Board should set all the rules for pre-release, and our amendments, to which the other place has disagreed, achieve just that. The UK’s pre-release access arrangements are among the most lax in the developed world. At present, up to 40 people have access to statistics ahead of their publication for five days, or 40.5 hours in the case of market-sensitive statistics. Australia manages with three hours, France has only one hour, and Canada grants Ministers access to market-sensitive statistics at 5 pm the day prior to release. During the passage of the Bill in another place the Government announced a retreat from the current position to 40.5 hours for all statistics, and last week they announced a further retreat to 24 hours for all statistics. Although that was an eye-catching announcement by the new Prime Minister, as the Minister has confirmed today, there is no government amendment to put a maximum of 24 hours in the Bill. Indeed, the Minister, when talking about this issue earlier, referred ominously to the Government needing to retain flexibility—which means doing something other than 24 hours when it suits them. Twenty-four hours would still give Ministers in this country much more access than in other developed economies. I should make it clear that we accept the principle of Ministers and officials getting access to statistics before they are released. We have never thought that the debate was about the specifics of particular time limits. The important issue is who makes the rules, and, as I said, our clear view is that that should be the independent Statistics Board. The Minister talked about the consultation that the Government commit to before the first statutory instrument setting out the rules. It is welcome that the Government are prepared to consult the board, or the shadow board, but why have they not included the board in the Bill? If the Commons amendments were allowed to stand, there would be no statutory constraint on the Government whatever. They would be able, whatever consultation they carried out, to draft the statutory instrument as they chose. I hope the Minister will not pretend that Parliament has any real say in the content of an order. Our view remains that the Statistics Board should be in the driving seat. If the Government believe that the board should not have an unfettered power to set the rules, there could be other ways of achieving either the Government’s involvement or that of Parliament by drafting in the involvement of either or both by way of consultation or approval mechanisms, but to leave everything in the hands of the Government alone is, for us, not acceptable. The Minister referred to the fact that the statutory instrument that will set the rules will become part of the code, and hence something against which national statistics will be assessed. I find that argument faintly ludicrous. Is the Minister seriously saying that the prospect of the designation of a statistic as ““national”” will have any impact at all on whether his fellow Ministers will follow the pre-release rules? The Minister merely reveals one of the unremedied weaknesses in the Bill; namely, enforcement other than by public announcements of disagreement. That leads me to my final point. The Statistics Board can use its annual reports or other reports to highlight its views on pre-release, on either the rules themselves or the fact that they have been breached. In extremis the chairman or other members could resign if they were not listened to. Those are desperate measures, however. How much more straightforward it would be if the board set the rules. It would then be able to fine-tune them on a flexible basis over time, perhaps in response to blatant breaches of the rules or even to a principled case made by a particular Minister for greater pre-release access. That would be a system to be proud of. I beg to move. Moved, as an amendment to Motion C, leave out from ““House”” to end, and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 12, 13, 15, 20, 67 to 70 and 72, and do disagree with Commons Amendments Nos. 15B and 15C.””.—(Baroness Noakes.)