Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I have tabled our opposition to Clause 2 standing part of the Bill in order to debate whether a non-ministerial department is the best way to achieve an independent organisation for statistics. This aspect of the Government’s proposals has received relatively little attention. The Government have relied on the existence of20 or so other non-ministerial departments as a precedent. The use of that model goes back a long way and it is a well tested method of creating some independence within government. However, we should be under no illusions that those organisations remain firmly within government. Indeed, one of the reasons for using the model is to allow fluidity of staffing between the non-ministerial department and the rest of Whitehall, which can certainly have advantages. The name ““non-ministerial department”” is a bit of a misnomer because it implies that Ministers disappear from the picture. Clearly, they do not: Ministers remain responsible for the Government’s legislation; they appoint the key people; they retain mechanisms that control the terms and numbers of staff; and generally they set the amount of money that is needed. Under this Bill, they retain powers of direction so that they can step in. We shall come to those powers later. The issue I want to draw to the attention of the Committee is that this is the first time the Government have sought to use a non-ministerial department model to encompass an organisation with split functions of oversight and operations, as set out in the Bill which has an assessment function separate from the National Statistician’s functions—in effect, to oversee the latter. The board is responsible both for the production of statistics and regulating them by regulating the work of the National Statistician and the executive office, and I do not believe that any of the other non-ministerial departments has that overlap of functions. We will be looking at the overlap of functions in more detail in later amendments, but for the purposes of this Motion I am trying to explore whether this model has previously been used for the overlapping arrangement. Other options were examined by the Government, as set out in their various documents before they produced the legislation on the Statistics Board, but none appeared to examine the use of a public corporation to carry out the function as set out in the Bill. Public corporations generally have a greater distance from government. They still have government involvement in appointments and so forth, but they have a greater degree of separation and therefore independence. I am much less clear that a non-ministerial department has sufficient independence. I have worked with some of the other non-ministerial departments—indeed, I sat on the board of two of them. I would characterise them as close to the departments which have responsibilities for them and say that they are certainly not arm’s-length. I have also worked with, or been appointed to, public corporations. In those instances, the length of the arm is very much longer. I believe that the element of distance in government is crucial to creating proper independence. On non-ministerial departments, I hope that the Minister can answer one question of detail. I understand that every government department must have an accounting officer and a principal finance officer. That applies whether the department is ministerial or non-ministerial. Will there be an accounting officer and a principal finance officer for the Statistics Board, and, if so, who will it be? Will the chairman or the National Statistician be the accounting officer? That might help the Committee to understand what the model means in practice. I am well aware that there was little opposition to the non-ministerial model during consultation, but I hope that the Minister agrees that the aim of the Bill is to create a statistics body that is actually independent and also has the appearance of independence. In that light, I have tabled the Motion to examine the rationale for using the non-ministerial department and whether it is a robust model for creating the degree of independence that we seek.