Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 5: 5: After Clause 8, insert the following new Clause— ““Co-ordination and consistency The Board is to promote— (a) the co-ordination of planning for and production of all official statistics, and (b) the production of official statistics that are consistent across all government departments and all parts of the United Kingdom (including the nations and regions.)”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment has been retabled to encourage the Minister to give a little more thought to the issues it raises. The slew of government amendments we are considering today testify to his close consideration of the points my noble friend made in Committee. I hope I can convince him to extend this same helpful attitude to this amendment as well. In Committee, the Minister made the point that statistics produced at a local level are bound to diverge to a greater or lesser extent. He is quite right—statistics should be produced close to where they are collected and used. However, the amendment in no way discourages this. Localism should—and, I hope, will—encourage greater responsiveness to the needs of users. That will indeed cause a certain amount of divergence in how statistics are presented or what data are collected, but there will also be a considerable amount of divergence arising for no reason whatever. One example might be the time of year that identical statistics are published in different areas of the country. There would be no benefit to such diversity and it would be extremely inconvenient for any user wishing to compare data between these areas. The amendment would ensure that such unnecessary divergence is prevented. It would not give the board to power to enforce consistency or give it a higher priority than local needs. Such an approach would be inappropriate and undesirable. But it would allow the board to identify and address unhelpful inconsistencies and make sure that different producers are aware of how similar statistics are produced in different areas. The Minister accepted in Committee that the board was the right body to undertake this role. I hope that he will be persuadable this time around about the benefits this amendment would bring. I beg to move.