Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I do not want to test the patience of the House, but I will give it one more try. We have the Comptroller and Auditor General, who is an officer of this House, considering an issue and coming up with an answer. We then have the national statistician—funded by the Treasury but an independent office; let us accept that—coming up with a different answer. We then discover that a lot of the work has been done on the basis of a Treasury paper that is supplied to the ONS, or a working group that is convened on the basis of a Treasury paper. My point is fairly obvious—that the outside world is left confused as to where the real source of authority for those decisions lies. If the Economic Secretary will be patient, I am trying to say that the new system will be better—of course it will. He asks me who I think was wrong. The Chancellor was wrong, two years ago, to say that the ONS was already clearly and obviously independent; otherwise, he would not be introducing this Bill to make it more so. On the surface, the Bill makes it look as though not much has changed. Instead of an office, we will have a non-ministerial department, but Treasury Ministers will still appoint the members of the board. It is welcome that funding is moving on to a quinquennial, rather than a triennial basis, but it will still be allocated by Treasury Ministers. In those two crucial respects, nothing will change. There will continue to be a code of practice, as now, but the board will not have the power to enforce it—a key weakness of the Bill to which I am sure we will return in Committee. Only Ministers will be able to propose statistics for inclusion as national statistics. Members on both sides of the House have dwelt on that, and it is right to draw attention to that essential weakness. Of course it is right that the board should ultimately decide what is a national statistic, but equally it, rather than Ministers, should have the power to initiate series for inclusion. Worst of all, it will be for Ministers to continue to control the much abused system of pre-release access. The Treasury Committee made proposals to strengthen the Bill in each of those respects. First, it recommended that the board’s role be wholly supervisory—I do not understand why Ministers have not accepted that. There is a fatal confusion in the Bill between the board’s duty as a regulator and its role as a statistics producer. We recommended—I stress that the Committee is an all-party body, with a Labour majority—a fully non-Executive board, to which the national statistician should report. That is all the more important because the Bill sweeps away the Statistics Commission—the one watchdog that we currently have. Somebody, not simply Parliament, needs to supervise directly the system as a whole. I urge Ministers to reconsider the matter. Secondly, let us consider the appointment of the national statistician. The Financial Secretary generously took many interventions but he could not quite answer mine. The Bill states simply:"““The National Statistician is to be—… appointed by Her Majesty””." It is not clear whether the appointment will be on the recommendation of the Chancellor, given the Treasury’s residual powers over the non-ministerial Department, or that of the Prime Minister. It is also unclear whether the new or the next national statistician will have the right of direct access to the Prime Minister, as Claus Moser enjoyed in the late 1960s and 1970s and as, for example, the service chiefs enjoy now. I hope that the Bill will provide for the national statistician to become a big public figure of the order of Chris Woodhead as head of Ofsted, or David, now Lord, Ramsbotham as chief inspector of prisons. I hope that the national statistician will become a widely respected figure in public policy making. I therefore believe that he or she should be appointed by the Prime Minister and have direct access to him on any matters of dispute with other ministerial Departments. Thirdly, the issue of scope has already been well canvassed by my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet. It is clear to everybody that it must ultimately be for the board to determine scope. The Financial Secretary conceded that, but did not go on to accept the natural consequence that the inclusion or exclusion of a specific statistical series must be a matter for the board. There should not be an option for Ministers to decide whether to list or delist a series of statistics that turns out to be politically inconvenient. It is essential for the board to have teeth to tackle non-compliance with the code. Year after year, when the Treasury Committee examines the annual reports, we see what happens when a body has no teeth. The Statistics Commission did its best but, in the end, it could name and shame only when it established breaches of the code. The Financial Secretary described most of the breaches as minor or ““inadvertent””. It is curious to note that, when one looks back through Statistics Commission annual reports, the breaches inadvertently occur in the same Departments year after year—the Department of Health, the Home Office, the Department responsible for local government and so on. However, some statistics have been misused for political purposes and ministerial advisers have put a gloss on them. Fourthly, let us consider pre-release, which has involved some of the more glaring abuses. Forewarned at such length of bad statistics, Ministers have been free—indeed, within their rights—to try to massage their release and cover the data with political topspin or bury the figures with other related announcements. Forewarned of good statistics, Ministers have not hesitated to commit breaches—inadvertently, of course, according to the Financial Secretary. The Prime Minister breached the code by leaking the forthcoming unemployment figures in his address to the annual TUC conference last September. If that was simply an inadvertent breach, perhaps the Financial Secretary will explain why the Cabinet Secretary was sent out to make an official apology for it. The extent of pre-release access is unacceptable. As the hon. Member for Twickenham said, no other country allows it and I believe that it should be cut altogether. I welcome the Financial Secretary’s announcement of cutting the time allowed for pre-release from five days to 40 hours. However, I urge him to reconsider the 40 hours. In the modern era, when the Government rightly no longer set interest rates, manage the currency—or are no longer able to manage the currency—only a handful of people need to see specific key statistics in advance. They include the Governor of the Bank of England, but others can wait like the rest of us. Ministers should have taken the opportunity to dispense with the pre-release nonsense altogether and not compromised halfway, as they have done. Indeed, Ministers have, in a way, made pre-release and spin statutory. They have placed it on an official footing and left it to Ministers, not the board, to set the new rules—granted, with parliamentary approval—for pre-release access. The independent board should set the new rules and I believe that it should cut the time for pre-release access. I want to answer directly the fair question that the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) posed about former Ministers’ views on pre-release access. He challenged two of us. Out of 14 members of the Treasury Committee, six were former Ministers. They had no difficulty in recommending a reduction from 40 hours to only three hours, as applies in Australia. The time is even shorter elsewhere. I therefore urge Ministers to reconsider. Commentators outside the House have made a further point on pre-release. Given that we shall have an independent board, there is a strong case for National Statistics staff to prepare and issue the press release that accompanies the figures, completely free of ministerial or special advisers’ spin. If a Minister wants to add his topspin later, that is a matter for him. The Queen’s Speech referred to the need"““to enhance confidence in Government statistics.””" National statistics are not only the Government’s statistics. They are more than simply a ministerial crutch or a parliamentary resource. In a proper democracy, statistics are an essential public good. They belong to all of us. After the suspicions of the past few years, we want our statistics back and we want them to be clean. The Bill, strengthened as it needs to be, should be the start, not the end, of that process.