Statistics and Registration Service Bill

The Financial Secretary has stated explicitly that the statistics board will be independent of the Government and accountable instead to Parliament. That sounds like a good idea, but we need to be sure that that represents something more than just an abstract constitutional doctrine and that it will have meaningful effect. Will the Financial Secretary therefore tell the House what, in practice, will be connoted by the term ““scrutiny””? What will we get that we do not already have, in terms of the opportunity to ask oral questions in one form or another, or an opportunity analogous to the debate on the reports of the Public Accounts Committee for Parliament independently to consider the independent output of the statistics board?