Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause— ““PART A1 The Commission for Official Statistics The Commission for Official Statistics ““Commission for Official Statistics (1) There shall be a commission to be known as the Commission for Official Statistics (in this Act called ““the Commission””) for the examination of the production, release and presentation of official statistics. (2) The Commission shall consist of six members of the House of Commons appointed by the House of Commons and six members of the House of Lords appointed by the House of Lords, none of whom shall be a Minister of the Crown. (3) The Commission shall, from time to time, present to each House of Parliament a report on the exercise of its functions. (4) Schedule (Commission for Official Statistics) shall have effect as regards the Commission.”” The noble Baroness said: As we embark on this Committee stage of the Bill, I shall repeat what I said at Second Reading. We on these Benches will have one test for every clause and subsection of this Bill: is it the best way to achieve the highest degree of public trust in statistics? There can be no other rationale for the Bill and we shall fail if, at the end, there remain doubts about the degree of real independence. With that background, I shall move Amendment No. 1 and speak to the other 12 amendments in the group. The amendments would strengthen Parliament’s influence on the Statistics Board and, in doing so, lessen the control of the Government. Amendment No. 1 would set up a commission of official statistics, which would consist of six members from each House of Parliament. At the heart of the amendments is a desire to separate the Statistics Board from government. We shall debate in more detail on a later amendment which bit of government—the Treasury or the Cabinet Office—would be the most appropriate guardian of powers over the Statistics Board, but these amendments address the question whether it should be Parliament or the Government in the driving seat. Clearly, the Statistics Board has to be accountable, but to whom? The Bill’s answer is that the Government will hold all the key levers over the board, while allowing some reporting to Parliament. The amendments take a different approach and would set up direct accountability to Parliament. Amendments Nos. 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 22, 25 and 29 set out that the commission will replace the role envisaged for the Treasury in Clauses 3, 4 and 5. These involve, in particular, the recommendation to Her Majesty of the appointment of the chairman of the board and the National Statistician, the appointment of the other members of the board and the terms and conditions of those appointments. I am in no doubt that one of the most effective ways of controlling an organisation is to control appointments to it. The Bill states that the non-executive directors will be appointed for between one and five years. It is a fact of life that individuals who want to be appointed in the first instance, or who want to be reappointed, know that their face has to fit for the person who appoints or reappoints them, usually a Secretary of State. It is also a fact of life that individuals who have been appointed often store up their real criticisms until after it is clear that they are not to be reappointed. We have seen that recently in the case of the outgoing chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. So the question that we should examine is whether individuals who embody the independence that we need to entrench in the Statistics Board will be better appointed by government Ministers or by a body of parliamentarians drawn from both Houses. It may be that politicians in general do not engender trust, but I suggest that the parliamentary solution is the only one designed to maximise trust in the new system. The other main function of the parliamentary commission will be to examine the budget of the Statistics Board, as set out in Amendments Nos. 237 and 238. The issue of the money available to the Statistics Board is fundamental. The Bill says, in effect, that the Treasury should decide that, but the Government have come up with a formula based on five-year funding deals that they trumpet as solving the problem of giving the Statistics Board the right amount of money. At our Second Reading debate, several noble Lords poured cold water on that idea. All the time that the Government—and, therefore, the Treasury—make the decision, the board will not have proper financial independence. Concerns have been expressed at the cuts that have already been forced on the ONS and the way in which the ONS is having to relocate itself far from any natural statistical community. That is not a policy of choice for the ONS, as is clear from the lack of retention of senior staff in the move. Even if the five-year settlement announced in the recent Budget is generous—and I have no reason to believe that it is—it gives no long-term certainty that the Statistics Board will not be squeezed in any future five-year settlement. We do not believe that the five-year settlement changes the fact that Treasury control is a recipe for funding problems in future. The only way in which Treasury control can be avoided is to give Parliament control over the budget of the Statistics Board. Nothing else, not even the involvement of the Cabinet Office, which we shall debate later, will guarantee that funding will follow the needs of the body. Amendment No. 112 creates a new schedule which sets out the detailed provisions for the commission. I do not believe that these provisions raise any particular issues that I need to draw to the attention of the Committee. The ideas behind these amendments are often referred to as the ““NAO model””, which has certainly been their inspiration. But the amendments do not replicate the NAO model; they leave the non-ministerial government department structure in place and hence preserve the necessary closeness of the Statistics Board’s activities to the other statistical activities across the whole of government. That would involve no change of status for the staff and thus facilitate the continuing movement within the Government Statistical Service. By contrast, the Comptroller and Auditor-General is a corporation sole and an officer of Parliament, and his staff in the NAO are not civil servants. My amendments thus represent a third way between the extreme independence created for the C&AG and the NAO by statute, with accountability lines to a parliamentary accounts commission, and the pure non-ministerial department model selected by the Government. The crucial differences are appointments and money, which are the aspects that cry out for a different approach if we are to create a properly independent Statistics Board. My noble friend Lord Jenkin has consistently advocated the role of a Joint Committee of both Houses to act as the scrutiny body in Parliament for the Statistics Board, an idea for which he gained much support at Second Reading. My amendments would create what my noble friend desires, but with the added bonus of powers over appointments and money. I beg to move.