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

My Lords, I thank both noble Lords who have contributed to this brief debate. I feel that the issues of data sharing and data confidentiality are like the issue of the security of the Palace of Westminster. We start off in entirely contradictory directions. We want to bring as many people as possible into the building because we want to be as open as possible, but at the same time we want to maintain the highest possible level of security. It is extremely difficult to combine those aims. We all recognise that it is much the same with data. The Government collect a great deal of data and it is immensely convenient for the purposes of economic and social policy to share as much of that data as possible, but we all know of the problems of confidentiality and of allowing the state to build up a vast database that reveals everything about every individual. The previous Government passed the 2007 Act as part of the effort to reconcile these contradictory directions and to provide an independent authority which would build in the tension between what Ministers want and what is required in terms of the confidentiality of data while attempting to avoid imposing on individuals and businesses the requirement to fill in forms every other day of the week. Perhaps I may say a little about the Beyond 2011 Programme and the future of the census. A decision has not yet been taken as to what we will do about the 2021 census, but I recognise from the papers I have read that there are a number of question marks over it. First, this year’s census cost £500 million to collect, and it is estimated that the 2021 census may cost around £1 billion. That is an issue that one has at least to consider. Secondly, the accuracy of the census has been going down from one successive census to the next because people move around much more rapidly than they used to. Preliminary estimates of the accuracy of this year’s census are that for each local authority area it is between 94 per cent and 80 per cent. When one has dropped to 80 per cent accuracy, one is into quite severe problems, particularly in terms of social policy, because it is for precisely those vulnerable communities where children do not have good English and where there are new migrants to this country, whether from Pakistan, Hungary or Patagonia, that all the different instruments of local and national government which combine to assist such communities need to be pulled together. What is going on in the Beyond 2011 Programme is a series of experiments to see how far we can improve the accuracy of data and how far we can perhaps provide, from alternative measures, a rolling programme of surveys and estimates which will substitute for the census in the future. I recognise that the census itself has immense historical value. In our house in Saltaire, which was built in 1863, we have in the hall the five censuses from 1871 to 1911. They tell us who lived in the house, how many people there were, where they were born and so on. The documents provide a fascinating snapshot of what was happening in a mill village during that period. We would indeed lose a very interesting historical record, but resistance to filling in the census form is sadly also growing. This year we ourselves faced questions such as which of our two houses we should put down, and as our younger people come and go, we wondered who we should list as actually resident in the house. We have been extremely speedy in getting through our statutory instruments this afternoon, and I must say that the expert officials who were going to give me advice in answering all the questions will arrive within the next half-hour. Therefore, in answer to some other questions that were put to me, it would be better for me to write to noble Lords than to offer them my half-informed impressions. There was a good question about the definition of a pupil’s first language. Again, it is quite right to recognise not just bilingualism in Welsh and English but, as in the part of England in which I do my politics, bilingualism in Urdu and English, or a whole range of other languages; for example, in Bradford and Leeds I am very conscious that the census failed to pick up quite substantial refugee and other communities. In the last election my wife and I canvassed a street that was almost entirely inhabited by people from Burma. I do not think that had been picked up by the authorities at a national level, but the local schools knew what was going on because that was where their children were going. That is part of the reason and justification for this sort of element. I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, perhaps on another occasion, just how large the migrant flow from Patagonia to Wales is—one of the many flows that are, as we know, going on in all directions at the moment. West Yorkshire certainly has a very large number of different communities and some of them are extremely mobile. A very large number of Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians came in the past 10 years. We do not know how many of them are still in West Yorkshire or how many of them have gone home. Again, that is the sort of thing that these sorts of surveys and statistics help us to discover. I hope that noble Lords will accept that I will write to them about the other questions that they raised. I commend these regulations to the Committee. Motion agreed.