Clause 8
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
2:30 pm
Julia Goldsworthy (Shadow Chief Secretary To the Treasury, Treasury; Falmouth and Camborne, Liberal Democrat)
The Minister has just said that he is keen to ensure that the board does not take on too much in its role in official statistics, but clause 8(1) says:
“The Board is to monitor the production and publication of official statistics.”
That seems to me like a responsibility that could in theory be quite weighty.
Amendment No. 87 would give the clause a better sense of balance. The explanatory notes say that subsection (1)
“requires the board to monitor the production and publication of official statistics. This role draws on the duties under the current framework for national statistics”.
Yet subsection (2) says that the board
“may report any concerns it has about—
(a) the quality of any official statistics,
(b) good practice in relation to any official statistics, or
(c) the comprehensiveness of any official statistics”.
The board is required to monitor statistics but not to report problems.
Furthermore, under subsection (3), the board is not required to publish any report that it undertakes. Amendment No. 87 highlights and seeks to redress that imbalance in the clause and make its weak language a bit stronger. We have been discussing restoring public confidence, but there is no scope for trust in the current proposals. The amendment is fairly straightforward, and I see no need to dwell on it.
I shall touch on amendments Nos. 18 and 193. We note that there are special funding arrangements outside the spending review process. It could be helpful to put them into the Bill in order to have the option to monitor such resources. Amendment No. 193, which was tabled by the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth, deals with issues in a similar vein to those raised throughout the debate. With those remarks, I look forward to the Minister’s response and his justification for the clause’s weak phrasing, particularly in subsections (2) and (3).