Statistics and Registration Service Bill

We have supported a number of these amendments and have tabled some of our own. The more we have looked at the arrangements in the Bill, the more unsatisfactory they appear to be. All statistics start life as official statistics. As new creations, they have a small ““o”” and a small ““s””. If for some reason the Minister wants them to be made big, grown-up national statistics with a capital ““N”” and a capital ““S””, he says to the Statistics Board, ““I’d like these statistics to be made bigger, more important statistics””. The board then looks at them. If, for a whole raft of reasons—some of which might be quite sensible under the thought processes that have gone into the Bill, but others might be quite reprehensible—Ministers do not wish their little statistics ever to reach the higher status, they just keep quiet about that and, as the Bill is drafted, the board is unable to do anything about it. That is why we tabled at an early stage a halfway house, proposing that the board should at the very least be able to initiate an assessment of any statistics it chooses, with a view to assessing them against the code and therefore seeing whether they qualify as national statistics. The second unsatisfactory issue in the drafting of the Bill is that if the board assesses the statistics against the code—the Minister having said that he would like some statistics to become national statistics—and they do not meet its requirements, all that will happen is that they return to being little official statistics and everything is all right. Again, that does not seem satisfactory. The proposal in Amendment No. 54 largely gets around that problem, so we support it.