Governance of Official Statistics

As a member of the Select Committee, I was very pleased to participate in the production of this report and to heartily support its conclusions and recommendations. I also support the hon. Gentleman, the Chair of the Committee, whose strong leadership on this and other reports has made a mark for our Committee. My concern all along has been rather wider than the report—the level of statistical understanding of the general public. As someone who formerly taught statistics, I suggest to Ministers, particularly in the Department for Education, that we ought to address the poor level of statistical understanding among the general populace and the poor levels of numeracy, so that the public are less prone to being bamboozled and manipulated by the dodgy statistics that the Chair so eloquently spoke about.