Statistics and Registration Service Bill

Indeed. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that clarification. On international comparisons, the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Kali Mountford) said that she was aware of only one European country that did not have some form of pre-release, but according to the information that I have seen, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Poland do not have pre-release at all. In those countries that do have it, it is very much curtailed, and is more like three hours. Ultimately, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet that the issue should be determined by the independent statistics board. The Government’s position cannot be justified. The statistics board will be subject to a potential conflict of interest, and it could be dragged in two directions, a point that has been addressed by a number of hon. Members. The board will both supervise statistics as a whole and be involved in the production of statistics, and that is a difficult situation. The Statistics Commission has performed a useful role in scrutinising official statistics, and one of the reasons that it was useful is that it is not involved in producing statistics itself; it is an independent body. It is to be abolished, and I have concerns that that will leave us without a body that performs that role. I have my doubts about whether the statistics board, albeit that it will have internal Chinese walls and what-have-you, will deal with that problem. I recognise that there is scope for amendment, but I do not think that the provisions included in the Bill at the moment address those concerns. In conclusion, the Bill, as it currently stands, is a missed opportunity. It establishes an independent statistics board, but the board’s membership is tightly controlled by the Treasury, and its responsibilities for producing statistics may conflict with its role of providing independent oversight. The Bill establishes a code, but allows Ministers to decide which statistics will have to comply with the code. As for the most obvious abuse in the system—the pre-release access arrangements—the Bill preserves the power of Ministers to determine the rules. For those reasons, I hope that, in Committee, there will be substantial amendments to a Bill that has the best of intentions, but that fails to live up to them.