Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I hope that the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) will forgive me if I do not follow her into the byways of funding for Slough. Hon. Members have been very kind about the Treasury Committee report, for which I am grateful. That report is not our first report: it is part of the scrutiny work that the Treasury Sub-Committee has exercised over the years, including annual hearings into the reports of the ONS and of the Statistics Commission and occasional hearings into one-off issues, such as the classification of Network Rail or the preparations for the census. I recognise that that work is limited, because, as the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) has said, the Treasury Committee has other obligations and probably needs strengthening. It is for the House to decide, as the Financial Secretary has invited it to do, how we can put that scrutiny work on to a more systematic basis. I certainly welcome the thoughts of my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) on how we can deepen and widen the parliamentary scrutiny of statistics. I welcome today’s Bill, because it is obviously important to put official statistics on to a statutory basis. It has been a long time coming—it has taken nearly 10 years to fulfil the manifesto commitment—but it is welcome for that reason and others. Over that period, statistics have become much more central to the political process. The trend probably started some time before that period, and the situation was intensified when the previous Conservative Government introduced measures such as league tables. However, the situation has been accentuated under this Government, because, as the Government are perfectly entitled to do, they have developed to a fine art the process of targetary. They started with some 600 targets, although there are many fewer now. If the Government determine a target, the public must be able to assess whether that target has been met in a way that is robustly, critically and independently measurable. Many of the targets have turned out to be rather nebulous, which is probably why some of them have been dropped. In some cases, Ministers have been able to define the extent to which they have met a target in rather nebulous ways. For example, they say, ““We are on track to meet the target””, which leaves the public confused whether the Government claim to have met it, to be meeting it or something else. As has been said, many of the statistics that we bandy around—for example, some hospital waiting times and some crime statistics—are not national statistics. There are also statistics which were official statistics and which have been discontinued. When I was an Opposition Treasury Front Bencher, there was a statistical series that measured the impact of indirect taxation on household income, but it has been discontinued. As almost all of my hon. Friends have said, the Government have been accused over the years of interfering in statistics, or at least there is the perception that they have interfered in key statistics. That has been especially true in some of the most important areas, such as the operation of the Government’s fiscal rules. It is bad enough that the Chancellor is able to change at will the start and end dates of the economic cycle, which could easily be independently determined by the Bank or the ONS rather than being validated afterwards by the NAO. Other statistical issues are critical to the way in which those fiscal rules operate. The first issue is the classification of PFI liabilities, which is a familiar subject to those on the Conservative Benches, and it concerns how such liabilities are properly accounted for and measured on the public balance sheets. The Chancellor has stated consistently in the past few years that such liabilities are measured in exactly the same way as they were by the previous Government. However, they are not measured in exactly the same way, and, far more importantly, they are much larger now than they were 15 years ago. We need to know in far more than simply accounting terms whether they are statistical public liabilities that should be treated properly on the balance sheet.