Statistics and Registration Service Bill

The Committee will have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Moser, with huge interest and will respect the enormous experience with which he speaks. I have two amendments in this group. Amendment No. 68 provides that the board must include in the code of practice rules about pre-release in which access is, "““the minimum necessary to meet the needs of Ministers””." That presupposes that the Bill will eventually make sure that the board, and not Ministers, take charge of the arrangements covering pre-release. Amendment No. 77 deals with the release of statistics generally and gives the board power in the code of practice, which we shall discuss, to include in the rules where the release is to be done, who is to be responsible, and the minimum time gap between release and ministerial or departmental comment on the figures. I agree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Moser. This group of amendments raises perhapsthe most important single issue surrounding the restoration of public trust in the system; namely, the arrangements for the release of statistics and for pre-release access to statistics. The group also exposes starkly what I can only describe as the cynicism of the Government’s present position: that their new Statistics Board, which is intended, in their own words, to distance Ministers from the whole process of statistics, is to be debarred entirely from having anything to do with the pre-release of access to official statistics. Clause 11 of the Bill leaves it to Ministers to make the rules. That is pretty well what happens currently and is what has contributed mightily to the loss of public trust. As the noble Lord, Lord Moser, made clear, there are two separate issues: first, the arrangements for the release of statistics generally; and, secondly, pre-release. First, on release generally, at Second Reading I described what all too often happens. In departments, the same press office that handles the release of the statistics also handles the ministerial statement. That statement often quotes selectively from the full statistics so as to put a spin on the figures. The professional commentary is thus obscured by the ministerial spin, and it is the spin that tends to dictate the headlines. There is really only one way to describe this process: it is corrupt. By that I mean that the process corrupts the clear messages in the statistics as disseminated by the professional statisticians by obscuring or even distorting them with selective political messages intended to steal the headlines. That is the first thing that has to be changed by amending the Bill to outlaw the process. There are two distinct activities—the professional dissemination and the political comment—and they need to be kept quite separate. As the noble Lord, Lord Moser, said, Ministers have some awareness of the problems created by the present process, as can be seen in their reference to what they have called the hub for the release of statistics. That seems to suggest that there is some process in mind that may go some way to deal with the problems. But we have been told absolutely nothing about how that hub is supposed to work, how it is to operate, who will be in charge, and how it will be policed. More important, will it separate dissemination from comment? It is all very well to say—and the noble Lord, Lord Moser, is very generous in his comments about this—that this is a step forward. The noble Lord may know more about it than I do, but I know nothing about how this hub is supposed to work, and I hope that today’s debate will give the Minister an opportunity to tell the Committee more about how it will work and to answer some of my questions. Who will be in charge, how will it be policed and will it separate dissemination from comment? The other issue is pre-release. The noble Lord, Lord Moser, has dealt with this, and I hope to do so quite briefly. The board must be given the clear duty to establish the rules and police the practice. As has been said, the United Kingdom is dramatically out of line with international practice with regard to what statistics are subject to pre-release, who has access and the length of time between pre-release and full dissemination. Again, this is an issue that simply must be put right. The board must be put in charge, the rules must be made clear and the Bill must provide for the proper enforcement of those rules. Naming and shaming will not be enough. Government departments have very thick skins. Those who deliberately flout the board’s rules must be held to account and reported to the parliamentary Select Committee, where perhaps they can be dealt with firmly. I have been told that these proposals have emerged as a result of much argument between the Treasury on the one hand and departmental ministers on the other. I have been told that the Treasury would have likedto have been able to deal with this abuse of thesystem but was defeated by an unholy coalitionof Ministers in other departments determined to cling on to the existing pre-release arrangements. Presumably these people hoped that that would preserve what they see as the political advantage that the current arrangements give them because of the opportunity to interpret the figures as I have described. Do they not realise the grave damage that is done to public trust by that process? Will not the consequence of clinging to the existing policies be simply to prolong or even deepen the public’s mistrust in the system? The Committee must deal with that along the lines so eloquently laid out a few moments ago by the noble Lord, Lord Moser. We should support his Amendment No. 42 and the other relevant amendments that he outlined at the beginning of his speech. This is perhaps the most important issue that we will deal with on the Bill, and we have to get it right.