Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will accept my noble friend’s amendment. Both my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, have explained with considerable force why there is real advantage in spelling out the public good in the way in which the amendment does. I shall give two examples. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, and others have referred to the problem for local governments of the paucity of statistics on immigration and population movements. It is only a week or so since the House debated the report of our own Economic Affairs Select Committee, to which Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, gave some very disturbing evidence on the first day of evidence. On 31 October last year, which is some while back, he was challenged on why he found it so difficult to provide accurate forecasts. He said: "““On the quantity side, the single biggest uncertainty is the size of the labour force. We just do not know how big the population of the United Kingdom is and, because the composition of the population and its split between different groups of workers, young versus old, migrant workers versus normally resident workers, has changed in recent years, it may well be that some of the statistics we are using are not giving a very accurate reading””." That puts it very modestly. I shall not read what he went on to say, but it is quite clear from that evidence and the Select Committee’s view of it that this is a very serious failure of the present system. The Bank is perhaps one of the most important users of statistics, and it is quite inadequate merely to wrap all this up in the phrase ““the public good””. One could give other examples, but I would have thought it very valuable to add the words in my noble friend’s amendment about the users of statistics. I shall not repeat what I said at an earlier stage when I quoted from the Statistics Commission’s own report about the needs of users, because that is already on the record. Statistics are produced for the benefit of those who are going to use them. It is not an exercise conducted in vacuo and simply for someone to stand back and say, ““This is for the public good””. The users have to develop policies and activities on the basis of the figures that the statisticians produce, which I would hope could be recognised. Another example of ““the public good”” is the access of the public to the figures. Remarkably, there arrived on my desk this morning a report from the Statistics Commission entitled, Data on Demand—Access to Official Statistics. This very thorough report is based on a couple of considerably detailed research studies. Its main point was to find out what use the public make of statistics. How do the public access statistics? Is it easy for them? Do the public find it easy, for instance, to access statistics via the internet? The answer is that it is not nearly easy enough. In this report, the Statistics Commission proposed a series of principles. Principle 1 states: "““Statistics are collected to be used and as wide a use of them as is possible should be encouraged, including the re-use of raw data for research outside government””." Principle 2 states: "““Since the most satisfactory forms of data provision are still evolving, UK government statisticians should adopt an explorative and experimental approach to dissemination and access to statistical data through the internet””." I shall not weary the House with principles 3 to 8 at this stage. I do not think that that is included in the phrase, ““the public good””. This is a question of users, who are not only the official users but, with the participative democracy that we are increasingly moving towards, also members of the ordinary public who will wish to have access through the means with which they are becoming familiar; namely, the internet. That would be summed up in my noble friend’s amendment for the benefit of users. I give just those two examples. I do not believe that the words in the Bill are sufficient to embrace all those considerations. My noble friend’s amendment does that. I hope that the Minister, on reflection, will think it possible to accept the amendment, or that, at Third Reading, he might like to put in words that have a similar effect.