Clause 3
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
12:00 pm
Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks, Conservative)
This group of amendments brings us to consider the size of the new board. We should recognise that Ministers have moved their position on the issue, as they started from the point of view that there should be a substantial number of non-executive board members, but such members will now constitute a majority. That did not, of course, satisfy the Treasury Committee, which was adamant that the board should be fully non-executive for lots of reasons—for example, to ensure that the National Statistician will be properly accountable to the board as the chief executive officer and that the supervisory and production functions of the new board will be properly separated. We may return later in the Bill to consider how we separate those functions, but for today’s purposes I must accept that the Government have made their decision and that the board will have a mix of executive and non-executive members. The issue before us now is what the exact balance should be.
The Bill proposes a board of nine members, of which six will be non-executive and three will be executive. Of the six non-executive members, three will be territorial—I hope that I have used the right term; perhaps national and territorial might have been a more appropriate phrase. Therefore, apart from the chairman, only two of the non-executive members, if they do not represent England, will be properly non-executive for the United Kingdom as a whole.
I thoroughly welcome the extent to which the Financial Secretary has ensured a more consistent coverage across the United Kingdom. That is a good thing, and far more progress has been made on that during the past year than I thought possible. I commend him and his team on that, but I shouldlike to raise the issue of the overall balance with him and the Committee. If only two of the board’snine members are non-territorial, non-executive members—if I can describe them in that way—that is both too few and too small a proportion of the board, and it will get the board into difficulties.
The board must be credibly independent. If the Governor of the Bank of England complains, as he has done, about the quality of immigration statistics and the effect that they have on policy decision makers in measuring the spare capacity in our economy, he will blame the board under the new system. Equally, however, the part executive, part non-executive board might well want to blame the Home Office or some other Department that has collected the statistics. If only three members of the board are properly non-executive, they may well be asked by the public, “Why didn’t you ensure that these statistics were correct at the time?”
If an issue arose because of the quality of the statistics produced by one of the devolved Administrations, the three territorial non-executive members of the board might well be inhibited from criticising the quality of the statistics or the decision to publish or not to publish them by one of the Administrations, because they rely on them for their appointment. That is unsatisfactory; the way to deal with it is to enlarge the board. My amendment would enlarge the board from nine overall members to 12, which would enable us to have five non-territorial non-executives. That is a better number, and it would give a better overall balance without extending the total membership of the board to a point at which it is unmanageable. Twelve is a perfectly manageable number.
Amendment No. 14, which I also tabled, is a probing amendment. I cannot really believe that the drafting of clause 4(4)(d) is as loose as it appears. I have looked in other statutes and found no reference to misbehaviour, which is incredibly difficult to define. In the Ofsted legislation, I found a measure under which Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools could be dismissed on the grounds of misconduct or incapacity, which are slightly easier to establish.
Under paragraph (d), a non-executive member of the board could be dismissed for virtually any reason at all. He could be dismissed for a traffic violation, because there is no objective qualification of what could constitute misbehaviour. There is not even a subjective qualification, such as that it should be misbehaviour in the eyes of the person who made the appointment. That needs to be tightened up. If we are talking about summary, on-the-spot dismissal, the behaviour clearly needs to relate to gross misconduct rather than a traffic violation. If it means misconduct, the definition needs to be tighter.