Official Statistics Order 2009

I rise with some trepidation following the battering that I have received from the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. I do so also partly protected by my ignorance of the discussions to which he referred in terms of the Joint Committee. However, some of the answers to the questions that he posed are in the questions that he raised. We are not proud of our position within the OECD in terms of trustworthiness of statistics, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, there has been an improvement of some 15 per cent in public perception and trust since Act came in, which means that we have started to turn the situation around, although there is a lot more to be done. That is why the list has been refined; that is why the code, to which I shall come in a minute, is so important. It is also why the Government have taken more action than any other to ensure the independence of statistics. We have created an independent authority, reporting directly to Parliament—not, I agree, necessarily in the way that the noble Lord wishes—to oversee and assess the production of official statistics. Our setting that authority on a statutory footing built on the framework for national statistics as set in 2000. We are therefore building the statute on what we already had as a practical operation. We have reduced pre-release access to official statistics from five days to 24 hours, and have limited the number of statistics to which it applies and the number of people who get it. We have also taken Ministers out of the governance of the ONS. I turn to the laboured point on knife crime statistics, which caused such a furore last December. I offer it as proof that the system works, because it led to a furore and the admission that those statistics had been produced and released prematurely. It led to the Home Secretary apologising to the House of Commons. Most importantly, it led to action to put in place measures to ensure that those errors would not be repeated.