Statistics and Registration Service Bill

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, we are grateful to the Government for having listened to the debate in Committee and for making these changes. They deal more comprehensively with the problems that we have identified than the amendments on the muddle, which we discussed before. Therefore, we are grateful for them. However, I still think we have in place an extremely cumbersome system for dealing with what might be perceived as a problem by the board on one single set of statistics. The board has to apply to the Minister, saying, in effect, ““Please can we designate these as national statistics so that we can look at them?””. For example, last week for the second time, MORI had a Market Research Society decision against it in terms of the way in which statistics, which it had produced for DCMS on live music venues, had been usedby DCMS. The argument was that DCMS had misrepresented what MORI had done. The Market Research Society found against MORI, at which point DCMS refused to accept the finding or to do anything about it. When the Bill, if amended as proposed, comes into force—perhaps the Minister can confirm whether I am right about this—and the Statistics Board hears about such a situation, it may think that is not very satisfactory and that the statistics are not national statistics—I would be amazed if they were. Under Clause 22, the board would go to the appropriate Minister at the DCMS and say, ““Please, we would like to make a request that these be recategorised as national statistics so that we can assess them to see whether we agree with the Market Research Society””. The Minister may or may not agree; the Bill sets out what happens in those circumstances. That is pretty inflexible. Without going through the formal procedure, which requires statements to Parliament and heaven knows what, the board should be able to have a quick look at how DCMS dealt with the statistics. If necessary, there would be a rap over the knuckles and it would be dealt with quickly, expeditiously and, I hope, flexibly. My slight concern is that the Statistics Board will decide in a number of cases that it is not worth its while going through the cumbersome procedure in the Bill, because the statistics questioned are not hugely significant. I therefore have some questions about whether that is an overcumbersome way of dealing with the problem, but I shall come on a later amendment to another way in which the board might be able to deal with such ““rap on the knuckle”” instances. My second question about Amendment No. 22 related to what seemed to be asymmetry of approach between UK statistics and those produced by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Under the proposed new clause: "““Where the appropriate authority is a Minister of the Crown, the Board must lay ... its notification ... before Parliament””," and when he responds the Minister has to lay a copy of his statement before Parliament. If the Minister is not a Minister of the Crown in the UK but a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland Minister in the devolved Administrations, there is no provision in the Bill about what the board does. It does not have to lay anything before the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly or the Northern Ireland Assembly. Equally, the relevant Ministers in those three jurisdictions do not have to make a statement in response to their legislative bodies. Therefore, there seems to be a lot less scrutiny and accountability in respect of statistics produced in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than in UK-wide statistics. Given that the amendments have been produced relatively recently, I suspect that this is just a gap in the drafting, but I hope that the Minister can reassure me that that disparity of treatment will be rectified at Third Reading. As the noble Baroness said, we welcome the spirit of the Government’s amendments in this group and will support them.