Statistics and Registration Service Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Moser, has put the case cogently and briefly and therefore I do not want to say much. However, I want to remind the Committee that lying behind much of this is the report by Professor Adrian Smith on criminal statistics. In that, he poured considerable doubt on the validity of the various series of criminal statistics which are produced by the Home Office. Under the definitions in the Bill, those are official statistics; they are produced not by the ONS, but by the Home Office. In the light of Professor Smith’s comments and criticisms of the handling of that in recent years, I regard it as bizarre that they should be outside the code that the Bill sets up. The Minister owes the Committee a considerable explanation of why the Government think that that is right. If you are going to have a code of practice for statistics, it should apply to all statistics, as my noble friend Lady Noakes and the noble Lord, Lord Moser, said. An unreal distinction is being drawn which once again, I suspect, has been included in the Bill at the behest of the departments which want to keep a tighter control over their own statistics. They do not want the board crawling over them too much and they certainly do not want them to be subject tothe board’s code of practice. Well, who is in charge? This is a Treasury Bill and, surely to goodness, the Treasury should say to the other departments, ““Look, we are all in the same game of trying to restore trust. Now, go away. We’re going to have all official statistics under the guidance of the code””. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not prepared to say that to his colleagues, Lord help us.