Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I apologise to the Committee for not being in my place when the noble Lord moved his amendment. In my long experience of dealing with statistics, I know of few which have a single interpretation. I spent a lot of my professional life debating monetarism, and no money number ever commands even partial unanimity, let alone universal unanimity. We have to be very careful. Freedom in these matters is important and, once a number has been released, it is impossible for anyone to declare, ““That is a misinterpretation””, because there is no single interpretation. I will not cite examples but, whenever a number is released, if the rate of growth looks good, you talk about that; if the absolute increase looks good, you talk about that; and cycles can go long or short. We should not burden the Statistics Board with this absolutely useless and time-consuming duty.