Health Bill

I say to the noble Lord that there is a well established convention that Ministers do not lean on the ONS to put official statistics into the arena and they do not control the release of those statistics. We can ask whether there is information that the ONS, as an independent statistical body, is prepared to put into the public arena, but I am not in any way going to suggest that as a Minister I am prepared to put pressure on the ONS to release official statistics. As the noble Lord knows, we would be strongly criticised for doing that, and people would say that we were seeking to use them to support our policies.