Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I am grateful for that clarification from the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, but if the National Statistician is seen as the board’s adviser and the board is still in the front line, the public perception of her will be that this is a back-room person, not a front-line person. That is what we need to tease out in these amendments. The Minister will be aware that the Royal Statistical Society, the Statistics Commission and the Treasury Select Committee in another place are at one on this issue. If we allow the Bill to remain without amendment, we will have created much scope for misunderstanding and muddle which would almost certainly lead to the undermining of trust—and we are trying to create trust in statistics. Perhaps the Minister would deal with the practical impact of some real-life examples. Suppose that expert users in local government, with academic support, criticise local government finance methodology on technical grounds—for example, that the weights in a linear model are not derived in a sensible way and that a non-linear approach would be better. The board agrees with that, but the National Statistician and the Department for Communities and Local Government argue that the criticisms are unfounded and that there is no case to answer. Whose opinion prevails? The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, will say that the National Statistician is the adviser and that any disagreement with that needs to be made public; but is that a sensible way to go about this? Should it not be the National Statistician who makes that judgment and the board should deal with any issues relating to the National Statistician’s performance if it believes that those judgments are incorrect or do not gain a proper degree of support in the communities affected by those judgments. These are difficult issues. We are creating a board with oversight functions but to which we give most of the functions; those functions are then carried out by the National Statistician who somehow hides behind the board. This has not been thought through and executed properly. I hope that the Minister will either accept some of the amendments, although I am sure that he will not accept all of them, or agree to come back at Report with government amendments to sort out this mess.