Statistics and Registration Service Bill

That reflects the complexity of data collection and the changing economy. The hon. Member for Slough talked about issues surrounding migration data and I recollect that one issue affecting data in around 2000 was the ability to capture transactions on the internet. That represented a move away from traditional sources of data collection, but I do not believe that we can blame the ONS for a change in the way the economy operates. As the economy changes and as population flows change, we need to reflect on it and adjust data collection methods in order to ensure that the data are complete. The ONS has a difficult job keeping up with those changes in the underlying economy and ensuring that it captures all the data. It may be as a consequence of changes to the economy that restatements have to be made in respect of the initial data released. A key point is that the Bill presents an opportunity for radical reform. I think that the Minister said that it was about 60 years since the last major statistics Bill was debated in the House, so we are talking about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I am afraid, however, that although the Treasury has made some progress towards greater independence, it has not gone far enough. The Bill could have been used to introduce more radical reforms to reassure users that statistics will be produced on an independent basis, free from potential political interference and in a way that will rebuild public confidence and trust. For statistics to be seen to be free from political interference, we need to satisfy four criteria. The governance and funding of the ONS have seen to be free from political inference and there has to be proper scrutiny of those who produce Government statistics. It is vital to have a clear structure that imposes the same rigour on the production of statistics across the whole of government and not just in the ONS. Finally, rules around access to statistics should be robust and limit the Government’s ability to put pre-emptive spin on them in advance of publication. How does the Bill measure up to those criteria? In the draft Bill that was produced before the last general election, we said that we should look to the NAO model of funding and scrutiny, and try to apply it to the ONS. The Government have gone part of the way down that route, but there is still progress to be made. The many comments that have been made by Members on both sides of the House about the increased role of parliamentary scrutiny of the statistics system show that the Government need to do more work in that area; perhaps we will return to the matter in Committee. One of the provisions that we put forward in the draft Bill was to change the funding arrangements of the ONS to take it outside the normal spending round so that there could be no sense of the ONS or its senior management being influenced by the fact that the Treasury held the purse strings. Earlier in today’s debate, the Financial Secretary outlined the funding proposals that he would like to implement for the ONS, involving a quinquennial review of funding. I hope that we will find a mechanism in Committee to discuss how that will work in practice and to see whether it will create the independence for the ONS that we want to see. Another welcome change that the Government have introduced is the statutory duty on the board to assess the quality of national statistics. A concern that was raised time and again today is that the same board that will have responsibility for oversight will also have executive responsibility for the preparation of statistics by the ONS. That unhelpfully muddles oversight with delivery. Surely the Treasury Committee report was right to state that"““we would prefer that the Government ensure a clear statutory separation between the role of the National Statistician in the executive (or operational) delivery of statistics, on the one hand and the board’s responsibilities for the oversight and scrutiny of the statistical system as a whole.””" We do not believe that the Government’s proposals for a national statistician and a head of assessment go far enough in separating the responsibility for production and for oversight. We need a clear divide at board level between those responsible for the production of statistics and those scrutinising their production if we are to restore public confidence and trust in statistics. The Bill also makes progress in that it seeks to ensure that the code of practice is applied to all national statistics prepared by Government Departments and not just to those prepared by the ONS, but that leaves a raft of other statistical data not covered by this standard. It seems odd, given this opportunity for radical reform, to perpetuate a two-tier system. The Select Committee report identified 250 different statistical series produced by Government Departments that will not need to be produced in line with the new code. Surely we should put all official statistics on the same footing, so that users can have the confidence that all statistics produced by the Government are produced to the same standard. It ought to be the intention of the Government that all official statistics attain the same high standard. On the dissemination of statistics, and particularly on pre-release access, the Bill represents a move forward, in that it talks about the need for a code and for a statutory instrument to set out a framework for pre-release access. It is unfortunate, however, that that framework will be determined not by, say, the board in consultation with the Treasury, but by the Treasury itself. Clause 11 sets out some fairly detailed parameters to define what should be in the statutory instrument, but the Government will still be able to exercise discretion, and to allow the rules to be flexible to accommodate their own needs. It would have been far better if the Treasury had gone a step further and given responsibility for the production of the code to the board. That would have given a clear sign to users that the pre-release was being done in a proper, transparent way and without being influenced by political considerations from the Treasury or any other Department. My final point is about the use of administrative data collected for another purpose, perhaps by another Department, to produce national statistics. That matter has caused a great deal of debate, and was covered extensively in the Treasury Committee inquiry and the Minister’s response to it. Although we welcome in principle the cost savings that come from not having to collect the same data twice from different sources, we need to ensure that the Bill includes sufficient safeguards to protect the confidentiality of data. We do not want a system in which data come from a Department to the ONS and are then taken out again by another Department for a wholly different purpose. We should make sure that that gateway is not two-way, allowing data to come in and out when that is inappropriate. We need to consider in Committee the detail underpinning the confidentiality provisions in the Bill to ensure that they are sufficiently robust to give people confidence that the data will not be misused once they are in the hands of the ONS. This is not a dry Bill about statistics, but an acutely political one that tells us a great deal about how this Government have reacted in the past, the Prime Minister and his use of statistics, and the attitude of his likely successor. It recognises the loss of public trust in statistics in recent years and proposes modest reforms that hint at a break with the past—perhaps at a new style of government. Yet the reforms and their authors are betrayed by their modesty. By introducing the Bill, the Government implicitly recognise that they have eroded public confidence in the integrity and independence of national statistics, but there is a lack of will in the Treasury to embrace radical reform that would demonstrate a new approach. The Treasury will use the cover of these modest reforms to show that it has changed, but their modesty indicates that it cannot and will not wean itself off its old tricks. The spin and misuse of data that we have seen in the past nine years is, I believe, set to continue if the Chancellor becomes Prime Minister.