Clause 8
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
2:30 pm
Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks, Conservative)
Without necessarily rejecting any of arguments that the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne put forward, I wish to speak specifically to my amendment No. 18.
I fear that I must again criticise the drafting of the Bill, thus ensuring that I shall not be invited to parliamentary counsels’ summer drinks party, if they have such a thing. The problem with the clause, particularly subsection (2), is that it is exclusive. It lists the only things about which the board may have concerns. If we are to confine its role to that of commentator, warner, monitor or a softer version of a regulator, it is a mistake then to limit the areas about which it may express concerns. With my amendment, I seek to add an important category, of which there may well be others: the funding and staffing resources available.
The hon. Lady might have slightly misunderstood my amendment. I am not concerned here by the funding and staffing available to national statistics, although we are concerned about that elsewhere. Indeed, I welcome the arrangements that have been made to push that outside the three-year comprehensive spending review. Obviously, what is important to the quality of statistics is the amount of funding and staffing resources devoted to them within each Department.
There are parallels to be drawn. The Treasury Committee, on which I have the honour of serving, recently took evidence from Mary Kagan, who is a senior official at the Treasury, as the Minister will know. One of her roles is to ensure that the finance function is properly discharged in other Departments, and she has been busily ensuring that we have more accountants and fully qualified financial officers in each Department. That role, for which the National Statistician had some responsibility in days gone by, is exactly the sort of role that I foresaw for the board: ensuring that that function is being properly exercised in each Department. I envisaged that if it had any concerns about budget cuts or a Department not giving priority to this area, it would be able to report them, but those are not matters about which it may be concerned under the clause.
It is a mistake to try to list and narrow down the areas about which the board may have concerns. We were told earlier that we should wait until the board has been set up and let it decide what it wants to decide, but with this clause the Minister invites Parliament to lay down the areas to which the board’s concern should be limited. That is a mistake.
The funding and staffing resources that are allocated to statistics in each Department is a primary area in which we want to ensure that the statistics board has a handle on what is happening. If it does not, it might not know why there is inconsistency or a problem in reporting a particular line of statistics. It needs to be able to go in and find out why. It may be that there are not enough statisticians in the Department or that the statistics division of the Department is not getting its fair share of the departmental budget allocation.
There is a strong case for rewriting subsection (2), or, if the Government are not prepared to do that, at least widening the categories about which the board may be concerned.