Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 54: 54: Clause 10, page 5, line 12, leave out ““National”” and insert ““Official”” The noble Baroness said: Amendment No. 54 has attracted the support of the noble Lords, Lord Moser and Lord Newby. I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group which stand in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising. In Clause 10 and the scope of the code of practice, we encounter another area of the Bill where the Government will fail to achieve the full potential of the new arrangements to restore trust in official statistics. Clause 10 requires the board to prepare a code of practice for national statistics. This is the first time in the Bill that we encounter national statistics as opposed to official statistics, which are referred to elsewhere. We support the existence of the code of practice and pay tribute to the work that the Statistics Commission has done in developing the content of a code. What we do not support is the Government picking and choosing which official statistics are to be assessed against the code, leading to designation as national statistics. We believe that the distinction between official and national statistics is unhelpful and confusing to lay users of statistics, and simply that no official statistics should be prepared without regard to the code of practice. Our amendments are slightly different from those in this group tabled by the Liberal Democrats, as theirs have a distinction between official and national statistics, admittedly on the basis of being within the control of the board rather than the control of government. Amendment No. 54 changes the title of the code to the ““Code of Practice for Official Statistics”” in Clause 10(l). There will be no separate national statistics in our scheme for this part of the Bill. Amendments Nos. 78, 80, 81, 82, 84 and 85 amend Clause 12 so that it is not for government departments to choose whether to have their statistics assessed against the code. The board will be required to assess all statistics. Amendments Nos. 87, 88 and 89 make consequential amendments to the reassessment provisions of Clause 13. Lastly, Amendment No. 91 converts the obligation of the board to publish a list of national statistics to one which publishes all official statistics together with a note of when they were assessed and the result of that assessment. The Statistics Commission and the Royal Statistical Society oppose the treatment of official and national statistics in this Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who I see is unfortunately no longer in his place, pointed out at Second Reading: "““That can only give rise to suspicion, even if unwarranted, that the Government want either to tolerate a Ryman league of second-rate statistics not covered by the code or, worse, that Ministers want to keep certain statistics in the lower league so that they can get away with things that are outside the disciplines of the code””.—[Official Report, 26/3/07; col. 1484.]" I do not know much about football leagues but I know that ““second rate”” is not consistent with achieving high degrees of public trust. I beg to move.