Statistics and Registration Service Bill

It would be helpful if the Economic Secretary could confirm that there is now agreement with the Clerk of the House as to how the reports will be laid. Those who have read the written evidence to the Treasury Committee on the independence of the statistics know that that was an issue. It would also be helpful if the hon. Gentleman could reiterate what the process will be for raising questions that have political significance, which the national statistician would not properly be able to answer. There are further issues in the Bill that may come up now or in Committee. The scope of clause 20 interests me. The board has freedom to do virtually anything. I do not see the limits to it. Would it, for example, be able to carry out the same opinion surveys as YouGov, Ipsos, MORI or ORC do for clients outside Government? If I have missed the limitations in the Bill, perhaps the Economic Secretary will be able to spell them out for me. I recommend to those who follow the debate, who are more likely to be specialists than generalists, that they reread the written evidence to the Treasury Committee in its report published on 18 July. That will refresh their minds about some of the more expert opinions, to which we add. I am not the statistician in my family. I am not even the best mathematician, but I have perhaps had more experience of parliamentary service and ministerial service than most others in my family. I remember that when I first became a Minister, officials from the research department of the Department of Employment came to me with a report that did not confirm the prejudices of one of my predecessors, and asked what should be done with it. I said that I assumed that all research paid for by public money was published. They looked at me as though that was the right answer, but they were expecting to tell me that, rather than my suggesting to them that that was the right thing to do. Can the Economic Secretary tell me how difficult it would be for Government to take on the obligation that all research done for Government, with certain obvious exceptions such as security or significant economic national interest issues which for some reason could not be made public, is published? That would include opinions, possible future policies and all other research, unless there is an explicit reason why it cannot be made available. I am not saying that there should always be a press notice. However, following on from the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne), when Governments start putting statistical information on a website without any public announcement, could it be a requirement that they notify the statistics board that they have done so? If the information is not statistical, but is important for some other reason for the public to know, could they find a way of making that known to an invigilator? Although I am not trying to suggest that most of the things that the Government try to do are done in the wrong way, for a wrong purpose or as a result of a wrong policy, this Government can accurately be accused of being more misleading and more guilty of covering things up than many others whom I have observed. Returning to the research report, I suggested that we hold a press conference and that the press people give three days’ notice of it. The press people rang up every journalist who might conceivably come a few hours before the press conference to add that they thought that the Minister wanted some personal publicity. One journalist came to the press conference and there was no report on that rather embarrassing research result. I commend that approach to the Economic Secretary. My general approach in my six years as a junior Minister was that it is normally better to make an existing system work better than it is to change the system. The Government brought in the Statistics Commission six years ago. I know a number of the members of that commission and I do not see why it had to become integrated with the executive side of the ONS. The Economic Secretary clearly knows about the evidence presented by the Royal Statistical Society and others that the Government should not have done that. Last year’s Government response to the Treasury Committee did not explain why the Government did not follow the professional advice that they were given. They said that they would not follow it, but they did not explain the reason in detail. Given the weight of those who argued that the Government should have maintained the separation between non-executive invigilation, support for the independence of the statistical service and the executive work that the statistical office itself must do, the House and the country, as well as the statistical service, deserve a detailed explanation from the Economic Secretary—fortunately, he will have plenty of time to do so in this debate. There are plenty of amusing things that one can do with statistics, and one of the better examples was told to me by the member of my family who is a statistician: the hourly pay rates of women in part-time manual work are lower than those of men in part-time manual work; the hourly pay rates of white-collar women in part-time work are lower than those of white-collar men in part-time work; but taken together, the figure for all part-time women is higher than that for all part-time men. One needs to be quite a good statistician to know how that is possible—more women than men work part time in white-collar jobs. That issue does not matter a great deal in this debate. What matters is whether the Government are asking the statistical service to do the right kind of work, whether they make changes in a rational way that has the support, if possible, of people in the statistical service and outside users, whether they put embarrassing information behind some kind of curtain and whether they mislead people by putting out their commentary without allowing people to see a reliable statistical series. I hope that the Economic Secretary will confirm—I expect him to do so—that the dates for the release of information in a regular series will be announced a year in advance. I also hope that he will confirm that it is the duty of Ministers to ensure that the statistics from their Departments, whether that involves National Statistics or departmental statistics, are released in press notices that contain the same information in the same order and that any changes to the way in which the statistics are presented will be announced in advance and will not be released suddenly because the figures are available in a particular month, quarter or year. To those who believe that some kinds of statistics are easier than others, I offer one example. Road casualty figures used to come out in a report called, ““Road Safety””, which was not about road safety at all, but the opposite—road casualties. I think that it is now called the accident report and that it counts casualties. When, as a junior Transport Minister, I asked how soon I would know the provisional figures for those who had died in a particular month, I was told that the preliminary provisional figures came out two months after the end of the month in which I was interested. That was because people were counted as having died within the month if they died within 28 days of the crash. I asked why we could not assume that the 28-day hangover, or tail, was roughly the same month by month so that I could have the provisional preliminary figures, or at least an indication of them, on the day after the end of the month. Eventually, it was decided that that was possible. The figures on drink-driving, which is another critical issue in cutting casualties, came out every six months. The road casualty figures came out more than a year after the year of their being counted because of the need to reconcile information from the police ““Stats 19”” reports and to employ various other ways of trying to ensure that the statistics had integrity. It was only when I started pushing that we discovered that the figures for the Metropolitan police were not being included in the national figures because a simple error was being made and a link in the statistical flow was missing. That was a pity, but it was not crucial because it was nobody’s intention to try to mislead. I am trying to make the Minister understand that having the purpose of statistics in mind matters as much as the statistics themselves. Obviously, changes sometimes come about. In the Department of Employment in the old days, say from the time of the war onwards, industrial disputes were counted with mining in one column and the rest of industry and commerce in another. When the mining industry stopped having its series of disputes and then, as events turned out, was going to be significantly reduced, there was no need to carry on doing that. The purpose of statistics can change, as can what people want to focus on. The statistics service, in Departments and centrally across Government, should provide a dampener on Ministers’ enthusiasms. The half-life of the average junior Minister is about nine months. That means that we may find changes to the statistical service being pushed forward by enthusiastic Ministers who have come in and are trying to make a name for themselves but are not there to see the results of their initiatives. I hope that the statistical service, in Departments and in National Statistics, which additionally covers most Departments, will be backed up with sufficient weight to show that there is a degree of inertia in the system as well as a responsiveness to what people are trying to achieve. It is far better to have earlier figures with subsequent revisions than to wait for too long to have figures that need far less revision. Certainly, an early indication of what was going on helped me when I had ministerial responsibilities and contributed to some pretty dramatic changes in important matters such as drink-driving, whereby we cut the incidence of drink-driving by young men by two thirds in two years with no changes to the law, sentencing or enforcement. We found an approach that was working and needed the statistics to show us that what we were doing was correct. I hope that people will use statistics not in the time-honoured joke way but to illuminate what they are doing and give an indication of what they should be trying to achieve. The public purpose of statistics should be to help achieve ambitions, and that matters a great deal.