Statistics and Registration Service Bill

Not for the first time, there is a little dissonance between the Treasury Committee and Ministers. The fact is that the board will have a duty to report on coverage and to scrutinise best practice. If, in the judgment of the board, there are gaps, I am sure that it will make its views public to Parliament. The issue is whether the decision to designate, with its potential resource implications, should be made outside the Executive’s decisions on resource allocation. The judgment of the Government, which is reflected in the Bill, is that those decisions should be made by Ministers, but they will be scrutinised. The board’s wider responsibilities require it to scrutinise such decisions actively. My hon. Friend the Financial Secretary made clear our agreement with the Treasury Committee Sub-Committee that there is a case in principle for pre-release. That case was also echoed by several former Ministers. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet was the only hon. Member who appeared to doubt the case for pre-release. I shall give one example, because the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire asked for one. The obvious example in the current monetary policy framework is the open letter system. If, on the basis of pre-release information, it became clear to the Bank of England and the Treasury that inflation was likely to deviate more than one percentage point beyond the inflation target, the Bank could produce an open letter that it could publish simultaneously with the inflation figures. The Treasury would then be able to respond very quickly, as required under our procedures, to that open letter. If instead there was no pre-release and the figure was launched on to the markets without any preparation, the Bank would have to move quickly to produce an open letter, but that would take some hours or even days. The Treasury would not be able to respond until the Bank had published its letter, and there would be a period of uncertainty and potential instability in the financial markets. That is a clear reason why, for operational and policy purposes, pre-release is essential to the smooth and stable operation of monetary policy—and there are many other examples. Luckily, the open letter system has not had to be used, because inflation has been slow and stable. There is clearly a debate about how pre-release should operate in practice, which will be held in the House when details of the regulations are published. They will then be debated in Committee under the affirmative resolution procedure. My hon. Friend the Financial Secretary has made it clear that we will review the operation of the system after 12 months to see whether the pre-release system set out to Parliament is operating consistently with the principles guiding our approach. That is a good step forward, which, combined with the tightening of the pre-release system, means a substantial advance on the position on pre-release that we inherited from the previous Government in 1997, but there will be a full opportunity for Parliament to debate the matter if it judges that it wants to go further. That is a matter for Parliament.