Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, this is an important amendment, and I hope that the Minister will accept it. This legislation has had to face a fundamental problem from the very beginning; namely, that we have a decentralised system. One needs only to think how easy it would be if we had a single statistics office as is the case in most countries. Some of the problems that we have spent time discussing would not then arise; quite a few of them would be much easier to solve. However, our sticking, rightly, with a decentralised system is the reason for many of the problems that we have discussed. I have on one or two occasions tried to describe the double role that the National Statistician, and therefore the board, has. One job of the National Statistician is to run ONS—what used to be called the CSO—and provide leadership as director of a single office at the centre. It is an extremely important role. In her other job, the National Statistician is rightly to be held to account as adviser to the statisticians in all the other government departments and, in a sense, as having ultimate responsibility for anything that happens anywhere in government statistics. That was certainly the case in my time as director of the CSO. If there were problems in health statistics with which the Department of Health would not or could not deal, I was ultimately held responsible, and rightly so; and so it has remained throughout the years. The amendment touches not only on the geographical consistency that is obviously needed—it has been remarked on by other noble Lords—across regions, but also on the fact that we are part of an international statistical system. Many of our statistics have to relate to the UK—that has to be dealt with. The amendment would mean also that the National Statistician and her forces had a responsibility for helping to plan the system asa whole, covering all government departments. It is a difficult role, because one has to recognise that, in a decentralised system, there is obviously great power in the hands of Secretaries of State, Ministers and civil servants in the departments. It is a much more diplomatic, indirect role, but it is nevertheless the National Statistician’s responsibility. I had hoped from time to time that the National Statistician’s responsibility for the GSS as a whole would be formally recognised in the Bill. I understand that this has not happened for two reasons. The first is reluctance on the part of the draftsmen to recognise the GSS as a legal entity. I do not quite understand why that is such a problem. The other reason is that, in many departments, statistics are in the hands of people who are not part of the professional group of statisticians, which I understand. However, it makes acceptance of the amendment even more important, so that, in one way or another, all statistics are seen as a single system, though decentralised administratively.