Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I would agree with that if I believed that what people considered to be wrong was political interference, and political interference alone. I do not think that people will feel much more confident in statistics afterwards than they did before. People perceive that there is political interference, and perception is reality. Independence from Government is often worth achieving for its own sake, because it is a public good in any event, notwithstanding public view. If we believe in decentralisation, it is a public good. That part of the debate can exist in its own right. It is not necessary to argue about whether politicians are good or bad, or about whether we should interfere in statistics. My experience is not very great; but whatever my distance from Government, I have watched Ministers do their job, and I have never witnessed any interference or seen any Ministers wanting to interfere. Perhaps that is due simply to the fact that I work with people of high integrity. Perhaps I am lucky in that respect. I have also worked, as a civil servant, with civil servants of high integrity. I believe with my whole heart that they are worthy of high esteem. I trust them completely, and do not believe that they commit, or want to commit, improper deeds. I am certain that they would not want to do the wrong thing. I do not know of many people who start their working day by asking themselves ““How can I do the public down today?”” Most people do not go about their business in that way. Some do, of course. If there were not such people in the world, there would be no criminality. Most people, however, begin their day just wanting to do a good day’s work, and we should trust them. That is most people doing most work, and it includes us. There is, however, another purpose to what we are doing. When we produce figures, they must be right, but not every provision in the Bill travels in that direction. There are other things that we could do to ensure that figures are right, and they need not be in the purview of Parliament. They could be dealt with in codes of practice that are not only the property of the civil service or the Office for National Statistics—or the Statistics Board, as it will become. There are other professional bodies with an interest in statisticians and in whether their professional integrity is working well. We should be asking what statistics can and cannot do. We act as if we should shoot the messenger all the time and as if the statistics themselves were to blame, which they are not. The figures are not the problem. What we should be thinking about is how maturely we deal with the information contained in them. We have heard some interesting comments today about what we should do when presented with figures, and how we should analyse them. We are always using the national crime statistics, for example. One aspect of those statistics—which is not really very complicated, but tends to confuse us—is the question of whether overall crime is increasing or decreasing. Generally, people just want to know whether they are a little bit safer or a little bit worse off. Can they feel safer or less safe, living where they do? It is not usually necessary for people to look at the national crime statistics to know whether they should feel safer in the town or village where they live. They can look around them and decide for themselves. People see reports on television, and politicians arguing among themselves. Someone will say, ““But knife crime is up””, and it will be true. We must be strong and secure enough to say that it is true, and that must inform public debate on public policy and what we should do about knife crime. Accepting that knife crime is up, however, does not mean accepting that more young people are carrying knives and using them. It does not mean that crime in general is on the increase. We must be able to accept that that one crime is going in the wrong direction, while other things are getting better. We must be mature enough to say, ““But burglary is down, and car theft is down. Those things are going in the right direction.”” Those are the sets of figures, and we must be mature enough to accept them in the round. We should not say, ““You are massaging the figures, because you are not accepting this aspect of violent crime.”” We should not be having an artificial debate about which is the true figure, when the truth is that one aspect of crime is going in the wrong direction and another is going in the right direction.