Clause 11
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
11:00 am
Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks, Conservative)
Under your expert guidance, Sir John, we come to the issue of pre-release. The thrust of amendment No. 21 and consequential amendments Nos. 22 to 25 is that, as has been stated so often, pre-release should be a matter for the board ratherthan for Ministers. I am not alone—it is almost universal—in my belief that the provisions on pre-release are the biggest single mistake in the entire Bill. The amendments give us an opportunity to put it right and put the independence of statistics beyond all doubt.
It will be for the Minister to explain why he believes Ministers should keep control over the arrangements for pre-release. The Government have adopted an extraordinary position: in essence, they are saying that Ministers should decide how Ministers should behave. I do not know whether you are a cricketer, Sir John, but that is like giving batsmen the ability to decide whether the leg before wicket rule should apply to them. It is wrong in principle and wrong in practice.
The practice of pre-release has grown to a large extent. When the Treasury Committee considered it, we rapidly came to the conclusion that it was far too extensive and involved too many people. Amendments Nos. 26 and 27 would oblige the board to publish a list of people granted pre-release access. At the moment, it is necessary to trawl various websites to establish exactly who is entitled to pre-release access to each statistical series. I would start the other way around: if pre-release is to exist at all, it ought to be a privilege. The board should therefore be obliged to maintain a register of persons entitled to it.
Who is entitled to pre-release access? It might interest you, Sir John, to know how extensive the practice is. To take relatively humdrum statistics such as the series on weekly deaths in England and Wales,14 named civil servants get two and a half days’ advance notice of how many people have died. Three of those 14 are in the Health Protection Agency. One might think that it is a little late to inform the HPA of deaths in the previous week.
A series of statistics of more obvious economic importance are those on the labour market. Of course, they were the statistics famously abused by the Prime Minister in his speech to the TUC annual congress this year—he leaked them two days before they were due to be released and then sent the Cabinet Secretary, of all people, to apologise. How many people would the Committee estimate have pre-release access to the labour market statistics? There are 18 people in six Departments who get more than two days’ notice of them and a further 22 in nine Departments who get pre-release access “through the press office”.
In other words, 40 named officials have two days’ advance notice of the likely unemployment figures. One might well ask, “Why?” The list of those entitled to that information of course includes important figures such as the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor. There might be a case for arguing that the Governor should have two days’ advance notice of the unemployment figures. However, the last two officials on the list of those 40 people are referred to as “Treasury official clearing brief” and “Treasury official preparing brief”. Do 40 people, including Treasury officials preparing a brief, really need two days’ notice of the unemployment statistics? I think not.
Let us turn to the consumer price index—the key index of inflation on which the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee has to base its judgment, and which was the cause of some excitement last week when inflation edged 3 per cent., which was very close to the target range. Some 12 people have advance access to the consumer price index, “through the press office”—11 in the Treasury have two days’ notice of the inflation figure and one hapless official in the Department of Trade and Industry gets one day’s notice. The Committee might be surprised to learn that a further 12 officials have access to the CPI, including a Mr. Gareth Jones from the States of Guernsey policy and research unit and a Ms Hayley Harris from Customs and Excise who gets the figures in advance only in February. All 12 officials seem to get differing amounts of notice.
That is a mess. It is an abuse, and it has spread far too widely. There is no justification for 12, 20 or 40 different officials having far more advance notice than everyone else of what the figures are going to be. Nobody in Parliament gets that degree of notice, so we need to clean things up. I have not argued, and neither did the Treasury Committee in its report, that there is no case whatever for pre-release. There might well be a case for some very senior officers of the state, such as the Governor of the Bank of England or the Chancellor, having access to information as early as it is available—a day or two before publication. However, 40 people should certainly not have two days’ advance notice, and certainly not Treasury officials in charge of briefing.
When the Treasury Committee looked at that matter, it concluded that pre-release was far too extensive and needed to be cut back. Our recommendation was three hours. It is worth pointing out that the Committeewas Labour-dominated and included six former Ministers—people who had experience of pre-release and who saw no case for the extension. Furthermore, the Minister himself accepted that the practice had got out of hand. He gave evidence to the Committee on14 June and said, in answer to question 287:
“First of all, I would certainly accept that the pre-release arrangements contribute to the perception of interference in statistics.”
To be fair to him, he went on to argue that there had been very few proven cases of abuse, but then said:
“Nevertheless, there is a perception there.”
If there is a perception that the independence of statistics is threatened by the extent of the pre-release arrangements, we should take the first opportunity in the Bill to put the independence of statistics beyond all doubt. I cannot understand the point of setting up a new independent board but then saying that only Ministers should continue to be allowed to regulate the arrangements that apply to themselves, albeit with the approval of Parliament, and that that is the one matter with which the board should not deal. That is wrong in practice, as I think I have demonstrated, and certainly wrong in principle.