Clause 13
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
5:00 pm
John Healey (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; Wentworth, Labour)
This is the first of a series of clauses that provide important supplementary functions for the statistics board. The others—clauses 14 to 17—deal with programmes of assessment, principles and procedures, lists of national statistics and transitional provisions. Clause 13 provides for the reassessment of statistics, designated as national statistics under the previous clause, in order to determine whether they continue to comply with the code of practice. Thereafter, their designation as national statistics can be either confirmed or cancelled. This process will apply either because the statistics have been assessed previously by the board as meeting the code or because they are national statistics at the commencement of the new system. I suspect and hope that there will be rather less contention around this and some of the subsequent clauses, but nevertheless it is important and I commend it to the Committee.