Statistics and Registration Service Bill

The purpose of the Bill, which the hon. Member for Wentworth (John Healey) spelled out on Second Reading, is to restore confidence in the statistical base on which so many of our political decisions are made. That is much needed. When I was an Opposition health spokesman in the late 1990s, I remember patients being reclassified from one list to another, beds being reclassified as chairs, and, more recently, the former Chancellor’s ““revisions”” of the start and finish dates of the economic cycle. Those and many other examples have contributed to undermining public confidence in the statistical data that are provided to us. The Bill is a welcome attempt to address that. Conservative Members have long argued that an independent statistics service is a key part of the triple lock that will ensure fiscal and economic stability, along with the independent setting of interest rates and independent assessment of the fiscal rules. We have supported the principles of the Bill—after all, it enshrines much of our policy. My hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) made it clear from the outset that we would engage constructively in trying to improve the measure. There have been some successes so far. We welcome Government concessions that have strengthened the Bill and made it more likely to achieve its objective. Much has therefore been achieved. However, we need one last heave to make the Bill a substantial break with the past in relation to pre-release. The former national statistician identified that as the key matter for gaining public confidence. It is the last contentious issue, as the Exchequer Secretary said, and the subject of the Lords amendments that we are considering today. As the Bill left this place on 2 July, it uniquely preserved to Ministers the power, through secondary legislation, to set the rules for pre-release—who gets what and when—but no other aspects of control of statistics. In other words, Ministers will control the parameters for the operation of the spin machine about any given release of data. That was justified on the curious ground that"““Ministers themselves are best placed to judge how much pre-release access they require, and under what conditions they require it””.—[Official Report, 2 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 710.]" I bet they are. However, on that principle, Ministers may as well count the by-election votes tomorrow on the basis that they know best how many votes they require. The earlier the access to statistics, the greater the scope of controlling the agenda. There is no other reason for wanting to retain such long pre-release periods and total control of the rules for pre-release.