Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I very much support all these amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, partly because of the view that I expressed earlier about the total responsibility of the National Statistician for the whole production system as the chief technical adviser to the Government. We shall come back to that on a later clause. It is important that his or her—at the moment it is a woman—responsibilities are fully set out in statute for the first time, which is totally welcome, and that the statutory formulation reflects her double role: her obvious one of presiding over the Office for National Statistics and that of presiding professionally and technically over the entire system. As I know from experience, that is a much tougher part of the role. Both elements of the role are combined in one person and the second is just as important as the first.