Statistics and Registration Service Bill

All the established procedures were followed after that inadvertent indication of the unemployment statistics. If the hon. Lady looks at the reports of the Statistics Commission, which currently has the responsibility of investigating any apparent breaches of pre-release codes, she will see that although the perception is that pre-release arrangements undermine the integrity of statistics, such occurrences are in fact relatively rare. The commission investigated six breaches last year, and two breaches in the year before that, which was 2005. If she studies the reports, she will find that such breaches are inadvertent and generally involve not Ministers, but officials, and are the consequences of slip-ups in the system.