Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Pupil Information by Welsh Ministers) Regulations 2011

My Lords, the Minister will be delighted to know that I do not intend to oppose or object to these regulations. I can see the relief on his face at that statement. I will make a few comments on the reasoning and the likely outputs, and just touch on the confidentiality point. The mood of the Explanatory Memorandum seems to suggest that the Welsh regulation—I will only talk to the Welsh regulation—is to facilitate the Beyond 2011 Programme. It does not quite say it, but the language of the Explanatory Memorandum seems almost to suggest that the decision has already been made not to have the 2021 census. In this day and age there are probably three reasons for having a census. The first is as a source of information for decision making. I have looked at the Beyond 2011 Programme and the sense of trying to produce something of equivalent capability for decision making is there in the terms of reference, and that is good. We have also moved on in what the census is used for. The census has become highly valued in our society for academics, for what it can tell us about history, for the insights produced by past censuses— I am not sure what the correct plural is—that the academics have been able to glean, and the extent to which many citizens of this country find great value in being able to look back into their past, their families and the history of their surroundings. I hope the Government have not made the decision to abandon the 2021 census yet, and I hope that in making that decision they will take all considerations into account, including those that are of value to individuals as well as to the decision-making bureaucracy. Perhaps I should say administration—I would not call it bureaucracy because I like administrations. My second question is: what are they going to collect? The terms are probably well defined in some administration Act, but I would be grateful if the Minister would flesh them out a bit. The two things that stand out are the ethnic group and the source of that information, and what we mean for these purposes. My wife was foolish enough to buy some tickets to the Millennium Stadium, so I have to be partly Welsh in this. I am not sure whether Welshness is ethnic or not, but as sure as hell it is sensitive. Is a sense of Welshness or Celticness part of what is being gathered here, as well as other things? Clearly it is an important issue in the country. What do we mean by the ““source of that information””? The second area is what is almost the political correctness around asking about a pupil’s level of fluency in English where their first language is neither English nor Welsh. I see that if your first language is neither English nor Welsh, fluency in English is quite important. However, fluency in English is also important if your first language is Welsh, because in the United Kingdom the extent of fluency in English must be important information about the way people live in the wider community. We move about this land from Wales to England. If one is gathering information about fluency in languages, one should gather it comprehensively. We have a peculiar situation where, as I read it, if you are fluent in Welsh your fluency in English is not even a consideration.