Clause 5
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
9:00 am
Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth, Labour)
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise an issue that is similar to ones that I have raised in the past. I seek assurances from the Minister about the way in which the most basic information on local issues will be available in the future. Given the direction of travel in the Office of National Statistics and the discussion about the importance of the most local information possible, I am calling for something that follows that direction of travel.
My concern is that it is possible sometimes for the more local interests to get lost in the sound and furyof the discussion of national statistics, international comparisons and the rest. I have suggested that a further requirement should be added to the role of the National Statistician in clause 28. The clause states that the National Statistician is to be the board’s principal adviser on three things: the quality of official statistics, good practice in relation to official statistics and the comprehensiveness of official statistics. It is possible to argue that one could not have good practice in relation to official statistics without ensuring that they demonstrated evidence of local variations and that the comprehensiveness of official statistics must be such as to produce evidence of service needs at the local level.
My experience from working in the inner city is that in some areas figures at a ward or sub-ward level may be insufficiently fine-grained to ensure that needs are tackled and the facts are understood. I discovered when dealing with rural affairs that when one considers statistics in rural areas it is certainly the case in spades that the population may be so small that half a county is covered by ward-level statistics. It is important that the National Statistician has in mind not only the great sweep of statistics and policy but the need for the statistics that are produced, other than national statistics, to be sufficiently fine-grained to be overlaid and used by those who analyse service delivery requirements and so on.
I hope that the Minister, if he is unable immediately to leap to accept the sensible drafting of my amendment, will at least acknowledge the importance of the issues and show that they are taken as a part of what they are seeking to do in the Bill. I hope that the Minister can give a positive response on a point that in practice will be important to local authorities up and down the country, to voluntary and non-governmental organisations that are concerned with local issues, and to Members of Parliament. We frequently try to dig down into the needs of our constituents and such information is important, as is cross-cutting analysis rather than mere analysis down the silos of different bits of information. Such information allows one to consider health, education, economics and other social factors across the board. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively on that point, which in the long term will be of interest to Members from all parties in the House in practice, even if it is not exciting to them now.