Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 2: 2: After Clause 3, insert the following new Clause— ““Role of members (1) Subject to the provisions of sections 27 and 28, the National Statistician is to carry out the functions of the Board, and in respect of those functions he is to be the chief executive of the Board. (2) The non-executive members are to monitor the performance of— (a) all of the functions of the Board; (b) the National Statistician; (c) the Head of Assessment.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in Committee we had much discussion about what has become known as ““the muddle””. This refers to the problems of clarity regarding the role of the board, the members of the board, the National Statistician and the head of assessment. Those of us who spoke in Committee and external parties, such as the Royal Statistical Society and the Statistics Commission, have concerns on a number of points, including what the role of the chairman of the commission will be vis-à-vis the National Statistician and who will be the public face of the board. Are the various functions of the board, such as the production of statistics as set out in Clause 17, carried out in the name of the National Statistician or that of the board? Is it clear that the board holds the National Statistician to account for her performance in carrying out the board’s functions, and so on? Those and other concerns led us to table a series of amendments in Committee. The Minister said that the Government would reflect further and return to the issues on Report. To that end, he has tabled Amendments Nos. 29 to 35 in this group. These amendments were tabled only last week, but to ensure that we had a proper discussion of the issues on Report, I had already tabled Amendment No. 2 and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, had tabled Amendment No. 28. I do not pretend that Amendment No. 2 deals with all the problems we identified in Committee, but it attempts to make clear that the National Statistician will carry out most of the board’s functions in her own name as chief executive of the board. The amendment also seeks to ensure that the role of non-executive members includes assessment of the performance of the board’s functions and the people carrying them out. The Government’s amendments, to which I am sure the Minister will speak in detail, address only some of the problems that we identified in Committee. I welcome Amendments Nos. 33, 34 and 35, because they clarify the separation of the role of the head of assessment and his staff. Amendments Nos. 29 to 32 go some way to clarifying the role of the National Statistician. However, the respective roles of the National Statistician, the chairman, the non-executive members and the board as a collective body are still muddled. That is not helped by the recruitment process that the Government initiated for the chairman, with the job paying £150,000 a year for a three-day week. The job specification makes it clear that the person envisaged is a powerful and visible part of the Statistics Board, in relation not just to the board but also to the Government Statistical Service, which until now has been the preserve of the National Statistician. I do not believe that the Government’s amendments are sufficient to remove ambiguity from the Bill. Nevertheless, I recognise that organisations can operate successfully even if they have defective constitutional arrangements. Good, committed people are rarely held back by the problems bequeathed to them by the draftsmen, who do not understand how organisations have to work; they just get on with the job. The organisation specialists in the Treasury had a rather bizarre go at the internal structures of the Bank of England in the Bank of England Act 1998 and at the Financial Services Authority in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. In practice, both the Bank and the FSA have successfully evolved workarounds. They managed to do that because the various people involved in those bodies wanted their organisations to work well rather than to be restricted by the rules that appear to govern them. I hope that the Government will appoint good people to the new board, who will focus on successful outcomes and, in particular, on the restoration of trust in statistics. If they do, it will not much matter that some of the muddle remains in the Bill. In that spirit of hope, I expect to be able to support the government amendments in this group. I ask the Minister specifically to address the issue of performance review, which is dealt with in my Amendment No. 22 but not in his amendments. Does he accept that the role of the non-executive members of the board led by the chairman is to review the performance of the National Statistician, notwithstanding the fact that the Bill does not specifically say so? I hope that the Minister can answer that simple question. I beg to move.