Official Statistics Order 2009

It is always a pleasure to hear the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, speak on statistics. We debated these issues during the passage of the Bill and in subsequent debates on the establishment of a Joint Select Committee, when he said that there was a unanimous view in your Lordships’ House that this would be desirable, but the Commons rejected it out of hand. As the Minister said, the purpose of this exercise is to improve trust in official statistics. If it is the case that 33 per cent of people now trust official statistics, unless I am very much mistaken, that is a significant improvement from the position when the Bill was going through. If my memory serves me correctly I think that only 17 per cent of people trusted statistics. I had a question for the Minister on the extent to which either the Statistics Board or the Government have a regular series of opinion surveys on trust in official statistics. We are at a low level—27th out of 27—when one recalls that Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians and many others have far greater trust in their statistics than we have in ours. That is dismal, but it would be useful to know whether or not there is a trend in a positive direction. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, referred to knife crime. I am tempted to ask whether he is surprised. The track record of the Prime Minister as Chancellor in this regard was lamentable. He will know better than anybody that the Government, having set their face towards reforming how official statistics and national statistics are managed then produced a weak Bill that had to be almost completely rewritten by your Lordships’ House to make it stronger. In the end the Government had to capitulate. The Bill was weak because the Government did not want a strong one. There is no effective sanction in cases when the Government misbehave. The Bill allows national statistics to be downgraded to official statistics. When it was going through, Ministers explained that the prospect of having statistics downgraded so appalled Permanent Secretaries and senior officials that there would be no question of misusing information. The sanction would bring such public obloquy that they would bend over backwards to avoid it. The truth is that politicians still override that kind of consideration for the short-term consideration described by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. There is no effective sanction against Ministers who misuse statistics in this way. I read the Explanatory Notes with great interest. Noble Lords will know that we on these Benches have argued that there should be no difference between national and official statistics; all official statistics should be national statistics. For noble Lords who wonder why we take that view I commend them to the simple sentence in paragraph 4 of the Explanatory Notes, which states: ""This was because, once the Act came into force on 1 April 2008, a National statistic had to be an official statistic"." It is perhaps appropriate that the Act came into force on April Fool’s Day because that statement is complete gobbledegook. In practice that means that the bodies specified in the order will be expected to follow the code as best as they can. That is pathetic. The principles set out by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, about the kind of practices that should be followed in producing statistics would strike the ordinary person as being so blindingly obvious that anybody producing statistics, whether covered by the order or already covered, should be following the code. What is so difficult about that? What circumstances can there be in which the bodies covered by this order would find it impossible to follow the code? If all bodies are being told is that we would quite like them to follow the code as best they can, it is a very weak injunction. When we discussed the list last year, there was some discussion about where the Bank of England sat in respect of statistics. I believe that it is the case that the Bank of England is not covered by the legislation and that the Statistics Board and the National Statistician does not have oversight of statistics provided by the Bank of England. At that time, there was some discussion about why that might be the case, and I am spurred to raise the question again when I see that the Financial Services Authority is now covered by the schedule and the order. The Office for National Statistics has oversight over two legs of the tripartite authorities involved in statistics—namely, the Treasury and the FSA—but does not have oversight over the Bank of England. Do the Government have any plans to rectify that omission?