Statistics and Registration Service Bill

New clauses 1 and 3 and amendments Nos. 8 to 15 in this group seek to clarify the respective functions of the new statistics board and the National Statistician. I am happy to say that they have much in common with amendments Nos. 39, 43, 45, 46 and 47 from the Liberal Democrats. There is little in the Bill about the role of the National Statistician. Dr. Ivan Fellegi, who is one of the most highly respected statisticians in the world and who is chief statistician of Canada, told the Treasury Committee that the weak role assigned to the National Statistician in the Government’s proposals was ““a major shortcoming””. The Select Committee felt that the proposals needed major strengthening on that point and the Opposition agree. We would like the Bill to clarify and strengthen the role of the National Statistician in three key areas. First, it should be the National Statistician, not the board, who should be responsible for the production of the Office for National Statistics statistics, so that executive and supervisory functions are separated. Secondly, the Bill should emphasise the National Statistician’s duty to co-ordinate statistics in order to mitigate some of the inevitable drawbacks of our decentralised system for statistics. Thirdly, we wish to see the National Statistician’s status and authority as the leader of the Government’s statistical services acknowledged and enhanced by the Bill. If I may, I will speak to new clause 1 at the conclusion of my remarks, since it is interlinked with my third point and various elements of the other amendments in the group. I turn first to new clause 3 and amendments Nos. 3 to 15. We believe that the National Statistician, rather than the board, should be responsible for the production of official statistics, but not for all official statistics—only for those now produced by the ONS. We do not call for an end to the decentralised model that currently operates in the United Kingdom for producing statistics, but we do seek to ensure that there is a separation between those responsible for producing statistics and those responsible for regulating and scrutinising that production process. In a number of instances, as we have acknowledged throughout the debate in Parliament, the Bill represents a step in the right direction—a step that we believe is too timid, but, nevertheless, one that will in the main help to enhance the credibility of Government statistics. However, in this context, we believe that the Bill involves a step backwards. It removes one of the limited existing safeguards in relation to the Government statistical system. The Bill proposes to merge the Statistics Commission and the ONS. Under the Bill, the commission’s function of scrutinising statistics and the ONS’s function of producing them will both be carried out by the new statistics board. The Opposition believe that losing a fearless and independent watchdog and combining scrutiny and production functions will significantly undermine the effectiveness of the Government’s proposals. Amendments Nos. 8 to 15 seek to take the board out of direct involvement with statistical production. They remove key production functions from the board and vest them in the National Statistician, leaving the board tasked with scrutinising her activities and those of the ONS, and to a lesser extent those of the departmental statistical services.