Clause 11
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
12:15 pm
John Healey (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; Wentworth, Labour)
I am making the point that if the hon. Lady placed the responsibility on the board, as under amendment No. 92 and the proposals in amendments Nos. 21 and 22, such an arrangement could be put in place. I am not saying that the board must put it in place; that is not the tenor of the amendments. However, pre-release statistics are an important issue that has been widely discussed and two of the amendments that we are considering in this group would allow that to take place if they were passed.
On pre-release, if the concern is for the well-ordered release of statistical information into the public realm, to distinguish more clearly between statistical information and policy comment, and to reduce the risk of disclosing new figures before the officially planned and appointed time, frankly there is no better way of achieving exactly the opposite than to allow the press and Opposition pre-release access—other than perhaps the requirement to pre-release by uploading to YouTube or MySpace.