Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will be grateful to the Minister for his painstaking rehearsal of the Bill’s contents. I add my thanks to him and to the Financial Secretary,Mr Healey, for having arranged a meeting at which we were able to discuss some of the issues. Mr Healey kindly promised that we should have copies of the letter written to Members of another place and I was glad to be able to pick them up about 10 minutes before Question Time today—although they were dated last Wednesday. My noble friend Lady Noakes shakes her head; she probably has not had a copy yet. I do not know why that happens. The Minister recognised that certain aspects of the Bill will prove controversial. I can give the Bill a cautious welcome and I certainly welcome the intentions that have prompted the Government to introduce it. However, I cannot give it 10 out of 10; I can give it six or seven for effort, but no more than two or three for getting it right. I am glad that Parliament will have an enhanced role in the scrutiny of the system and, as I argued in the debate on the Queen’s Speech last November, I hope that that will involve both Houses. There is a wealth of experience in this House, and the system would benefit from it. I acknowledge the intention to distance Ministers from the processes of producing and disseminating statistics. However, the Bill still leaves far too much to Ministers’ discretion; for instance, Ministers decide whether official statistics will become national statistics and various other matters are left with them. I recognise that with the proposed Statistics Board, which the Minister outlined in some detail, the Government are aiming to establish a body with expertise and clout to oversee the processes, monitor the system and give advice. However, the Bill seriously muddies the role and responsibilities of the board with those of the National Statistician. Their roles are completely different and they should not be confused. There must be a much clearer distinction than the Bill provides between the function of producing and disseminating statistics and the quite different function of scrutiny and oversight of those who do that job. I do not see how the board can do both. As the Minister recognised, the biggest source of public mistrust is the handling of the release of statistics. The Bill has virtually nothing to say on that, except that Ministers seem determined to keep the right to decide the rules and principles on pre-release. As I indicated in my intervention a few moments ago, the board is explicitly excluded from having anything to do with that. What is the purpose of an overarching board if, on the issue of the greatest sensitivity, it is hands off? That cannot be right; the present release practices are wholly unacceptable. So what is the purpose of the Bill? The Minister spelled out the objectives, but the purpose is to restore public trust, which has undoubtedly been eroded in recent years. If any noble Lord doubts that, let him read the report last year of the Treasury Select Committee in another place, which was a damning indictment of the way in which the system is being manipulated by Ministers. Many noble Lords will remember the titter that ran round the House when Her Majesty read the sentence about this in the Queen’s Speech. I judge the Bill by whether it will restore that trust, and I find it wanting. My honourable friends in another place made valiant efforts to remedy the defects in ways that would have gone far to restore trust, but virtually all of them were rejected by Ministers. Therefore, this House must help Ministers to achieve their objective of restoring trust. We will work with Ministers to do that, but they must listen to what we say and I hope that they will realise the sense of the amendments that we will put forward. I am looking forward to a full and constructive Committee and Report on the Bill. At Second Reading, it would be quite wrong to go into detail about the changes that I believe must be made, but I shall briefly mention a few. The flaws in the present system are sometimes most clearly seen by those with a long professional interest in statistics, and we shall listen with great interest to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Moser, who is to follow me in a few moments. That professional concern is nowhere more evident than in release practices. I had the advantage of a long discussion with Professor Tim Holt, a former chief statistician and now chairman of the Royal Statistical Society. On the basis of his advice, I have made the point that the current release methods are unacceptable. Often the statistical release is disseminated alongside the ministerial release addressing policy implications. The same press office handles both and is required to present the statistics as objectively as possible while defending and promoting the Government’s policies. The ministerial statement often prints extracts from the statistics to defend and promote those policies. It thus shapes the public debate on aspects of the Minister’s choosing. That process fails to separate the contents and dissemination of statistical release, which is a matter for the professional statisticians, from the policy context, which is the legitimate concern of Ministers. These should be two separate processes and they should be seen to be two separate processes. The professional commentary by the statisticians should be by them alone. Policy comments are for Ministers. The two must stop being muddled up together. That is one of the principal sources of public concern and it is why the public have come to feel that the statistics are being manipulated by Ministers. The noble Lord mentioned the pre-release of statistics. The fact remains that, even with the changes in the Bill, the United Kingdom is wildly out of line with the practice in most other advanced countries. We allow pre-release on a far wider range of statistics and we allow a far greater number of people to see them and far further in advance than in almost any other advanced country. There is the risk of leaks and improper use. We all remember that, last September, the Prime Minister disclosed the employment figures to the Trades Union Congress two days before they were supposed to be released. The Minister said that that was inadvertent—some inadvertence! This aspect of the present system also gives rise to a wide perception of political interference. As I said in my intervention, the Bill astonishingly excludesthe Statistics Board from having any involvement in this process. That cannot possibly be right. It simply perpetuates the impression that Ministers are determined to brook no interference with their right to spin the statistics as they will. I have to ask the question: is that supposed to restore public trust? On the composition and role of the board, I will at this stage say only that we must see written into the Bill the clear distinction between the production of statistics and the oversight of those who produce them. It is not enough simply to assert, as the noble Lord did, that the way in which the board will work will ensure that there is a distinction. I look forward to the advice that the House will get from the noble Lord, Lord Moser, who has unparalleled experience in this field as a former chief statistician. Many other issues will need to be addressed in Committee, but I will mention one more now: the absence of any express commitment to co-ordinate the existing fragmented system. Many users, such as local authorities, need to draw on statistics from many different sources. There is a great need for more consistency within the UK-wide system. This morning, I had a communication from the Society of Business Economists, which made this point very strongly. This is especially true of the so-called cross-cutting issues, which cover statistics related to socially deprived areas, migration or pensions. The current system is widely perceived as not responding fast enough or flexibly enough to meet the needs of users. The Bill actually makes that co-ordination process worse. The present framework requires the National Statistician to produce a high-level business plan for statistics, in relation not just to the ONS but to all national statistics. There is no such requirement in the Bill. I ask the Minister: why not? Also, the current framework for statistics places an obligation on the Chancellor to maintain and develop the co-ordination structure for national statistics. That responsibility has not been assigned to the board or to the National Statistician and is therefore effectively lost. Again I say: why? Co-ordination is a professional function and there should be an obligation firmly placed by statute on the National Statistician to promote co-ordination and consistency across the whole UK system. The House may wish to take note of another aspect of that lack of co-ordination. A few days ago, I received a substantial publication from the Statistics Commission: Report No. 33: The Use Made of Official Statistics. In his covering letter to me, the chairman of the commission, Professor Rhind, explained its purpose. He said: "““The publication examined the use of official statistics by public and private sector organisations. It considers the extent to which those statistics influence decision-making and provides examples of specific uses. It also looks at the public value derived from those uses””." That is all wholly admirable. The report itself citesa number of examples of what the commission complained about when it argued for better planning. The conclusions state: "““Good statistical planning arrangements which identify and take due account of all users' needs would help to maximise the public value of official statistics ... Better planning might also benefit users inside government, for example by helping to avoid the hazards of setting targets for services without having the statistical information required to monitor or deliver the target””." The research gives a number of examples of that. It mentions the Government's aim to increase participation in sport, yet there is no plan to measure or collect any data, so no one knows whether the targets have any meaning or are being met. Energy retailers are required to set targets for helping the fuel-poor through energy efficiency, but they have no data at all about the households that require that help. A classic case was the New Deal. Here, Ministers started to boast of its success long before there were systems to measure the impact. I shall cite one piece of evidence in the report. The witness said: "““Here they were throwing millions and millions of pounds into this new initiative and the initial results suggested no movement. The same is true with all these initiatives—they just aren’t properly cooked before they go out and chase the figures””." Is that not the history of this Government? Indeed, it is worse than that. The pressure on officials to deliver targets is often intense. The result, as was noted at the weekend in a well informed article by Sue Cameron in the Financial Times, was that, "““officials had learned to massage the figures to get the results ministers wanted—‘gaming’, they called it in Whitehall””." If the civil servants producing the figures for publication as official statistics massage them to please Ministers, how on Earth are the public expected to put any trust in those statistics at all? Yet Ministers will cheerfully quote them in their press releases. Those examples illustrate starkly what a mountain the Government have to climb if they are to achieve their objective of restoring trust in the system. Although I applaud its purpose, I am convinced that the Bill needs substantial amendment if there is to be any hope of that purpose being achieved.