Statistics and Registration Service Bill

It has often been asked during the Bill’s passage why the code of practice will not apply to all official statistics, and I still do not feel that we have had a satisfactory answer. We should also ask what impact the Bill will have on official statistics that are not national statistics. We received an answer of sorts in Committee from the Financial Secretary. He said that"““we also expect the code to be one of the board’s main vehicles to promulgate the standards and definitions that it is required under clause 9 to produce and promote across all official statistics. I stress the importance of that point, which has perhaps not been clear before””." He was right to stress that because it had not been clear before. The Financial Secretary went on:"““It is important to note that, although the code’s formal status is as a statement of practice against which national statistics or candidate national statistics will be assessed, we expect the board to promote it as a code of good practice across all official statistics.””—[Official Report, Statistics and Registration Service Public Bill Committee, 18 January 2007; c. 151.]" That raises a particular difficulty because there is, of course, no sanction. The board is able to threaten nothing against the producers of statistics if they are in breach of the code, because the sole sanction in the Bill is that a statistic will either be assessed as a national statistic or it will not. That is a weakness. There is no sanction against official statistics and the producers of official statistics if they fail to meet the required standard, which is regrettable. My hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) made an important point about the argument that we cannot have a large number of official statistics being treated as national statistics and the code applying to them, because that would impose too much work on the statistics board. That is a strange position to adopt because we do not usually produce laws or regulations and then simply say, ““Well, if too many people could breach it, we won’t bother to enforce it.”” The board should apply the code as it sees fit in those areas where it considers that to be proportionate and appropriate, but everybody should try to comply with it. The other position is rather like saying about speed cameras that one should obey the speed limit only where there is a speed camera, and that as it is not practical to have speed cameras everywhere we will not have speed limits in places where we do not have them. That is a flawed approach, and that is why new clause 4 is eminently sensible and necessary.