Statistics and Registration Service Bill

There is a strong professional connection and a line of accountability on professional matters. The amendment poses the question of whether it is appropriate to legislate for those circumstances, and my argument is that it is not. Finally, amendment No. 15 seeks to make the National Statistician chief executive of the executive office, rather than the chief executive of the board. I do not accept that that is necessary or helpful, as I made clear in Committee. The board, as a corporate body, needs a chief executive, as the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet will accept. The chief executive need not be operationally involved in every aspect of the board’s activities to discharge that responsibility, and the Bill ensures that she is not. There are detailed provisions in the Bill on the role of the National Statistician specifying, for example, where her advice must be followed by the board, and activities in which she cannot be involved. She cannot, for example, approve the final form of a code or take part in the assessment of statistics produced by her office. Those provisions give the clearest possible guidance to the National Statistician and the board on their respective roles. In Committee, I made the point—and it has been made again today—that it is relatively common for Parliament to authorise a body to undertake a dual role. A local authority, for instance, is empowered both to promote development within its boundary and to grant planning permission. When it does so, it must structure itself to perform both functions as best it can, bearing in mind its overriding responsibility to act fairly, impartially and without bias. The fact that the chief executive may have to distance themselves from the conduct of a planning application does not disqualify them from being responsible as chief executive of the planning department for ensuring effective governance and operations. There are similar examples in central Government. The Department for Transport, for instance, may wish to develop transport networks, and it may be required, too, to consider orders that permit developments under the Transport and Works Act 1992. Similarly, the fact that the National Statistician is expressly distanced from decisions relating to the board’s own statistics assessment does not bar her from ultimate responsibility as chief executive to the board. In many cases, public policy and individual decisions can present a certain amount of tension, but there is no reason why they cannot be accommodated in a single organisation, or why they should be less transparent because of that fact, especially where proper separations are established, as is the case in the Bill. I hope that the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet and others who tabled amendments and new clauses will reflect on the response that I have given to their concerns and will not press the amendments. I hope that they will support Government amendment No. 48.