Statistics and Registration Service Bill

The overall inflation rate is the same for everyone. As I have explained, some items may be subject to greater inflation or deflation than others, and patterns of consumption may therefore impinge differently on different people. For instance, the cost of private education has risen considerably more than the general aggregate index—a fact that may concern Conservative Members. The single aggregate index that is required, however, demonstrates a system that is refined in the light of experience. In future it will be set out as a responsibility for the statistics board, and it will be more independent than the current system. Both the hon. Member for Sevenoaks and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire, as members of the Treasury Committee, have argued for that for some time. The Bill follows major statistical reforms that the Government introduced in 2000, which established the position of the national statistician, the concept of national statistics and the functions of the Statistics Commission. It is right now to build further on those reforms. The Bill is a tribute to the work of the Statistics Commission: it draws on that work and develops the commission’s duties, particularly the duty to monitor and report on the quality and coverage of all official statistics. The reason why it is right now to legislate for the independence of statistics and build on the reforms that we have already introduced is that statistics matter—the interest in today’s debate is testament to that—and in a rapidly changing economy and society, they matter more and more. They provide the data that help us to analyse and understand our economic, demographic, political, environmental and social worlds, and they form the evidence for debate, planning and policy. Importantly, in our modern democracy they inform the judgments that people make about the promises and performance of their Government. Statistics are central to the business of government, but they serve us all. They are a much wider public good, with an ever-widening range of users and currency. However, while United Kingdom statistics are widely regarded as among the best in the world, perceived levels of trust in the figures in our system are lower than we would want them to be. We are legislating for a system that can develop in the light of experience and in response to changing demands from users, and can, through its operation, raise levels of public confidence in Government statistics. We are legislating not just for the statistics currently produced by the Office for National Statistics, which encompass population estimates, labour market statistics and the production of the national accounts, but for the statistics produced in other Departments. In doing so, we are retaining the strongly decentralised nature of United Kingdom statistical production, a feature that has been a characteristic of our system for as long as statistics have been collected. We have been compiling official statistics— for instance, on imports and exports—for almost four centuries, and our first population census was conducted about 200 years ago. The benefits of such a system are clear, and are widely recognised. Our approach was supported by the vast majority of respondents to our consultation last year, including the Treasury Committee and the Statistics Commission. Not one of the 79 responses to that consultation argued for the removal of the statistical role of Departments and the centralising of all production in some form of super-ONS.