Statistics and Registration Service Bill

This may be a convenient moment to speak to my amendment, which is in the group, although the subject is somewhat different. In speaking to the amendment to leave out Clause 29(4), I draw attention to the increasingly confused and, as I see it, misunderstood governance proposals. On Second Reading, we started with a red herring—the assertion that the chosen governance model would meet the approval of the Financial Services Authority. If the Minister still thinks that that model will gain approval, he can ask the FSA whether it agrees. It would no doubt answer that since it does not regulate any body remotely like the proposed Statistics Board, it has no comment to make. Will the Minister test that proposition? However, since introducing red herrings is the classic way of diverting attention from what is really going on, we will do well to concentrate on whether the Government’s proposals will work, regardless of where they come from. It is clear both from Committee proceedings to date and from information on the search for the chair that the Treasury considers that being the Statistics Board’s adviser will be the National Statistician’s real role. The promised position of chief executive is an add-on. The chair, although described as non-executive in the Bill, is to be executive, I believe. The advertised salary of £150,000, presumably pensionable, must give rise to a remuneration package for three days a week way beyond any existing package for non-executive chairs. If it does not, may we be given the relevant precedents? The chair’s rate of pay is considerably higher than that enjoyed by the National Statistician—always a good test of who is in charge. The Minister circulated a letter on the subject, but may we also have copies of the search consultants’ information pack? It is clear that the chair is to be top dog—a concept described by the Minister as crude, as indeed it is, given the drafting of the Bill. Given those developments, Clause 29(4) becomes even more unacceptable because it hammers home the reduction in the National Statistician’s position to that of any executive who accepts that she must do or not do whatever the chair tells her, in the way in which he tells her to do it. Yet she is head of her profession. What about the impact on independence and the building of trust—the twin objectives of the Bill? I wonder how those arrangements are to be built into the contracts of employment for the chair and the National Statistician. We need to understand those arrangements because if, on the one hand, the chair is to be deeply involved in operations and, on the other, the National Statistician is to have no public profile, I for one have been misled. The clause should be dropped.