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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

Clearly, the hon. Gentleman is concerned about the decision back in the ’80s to shift responsibility for the ONS from the Cabinet Office to the Treasury. In that case, I hope that he will vote in favour of amendments to change the Government’s proposal that the Treasury should retain those functions. I turn to release practices. If the reform is to succeed in building public trust, pre-release rules should be determined by the board, not by politicians. Lax pre-release rules can significantly undermine public trust in statistics by fuelling justifiable concern that Ministers will be able to place a misleading spin on the figures. According to the Statistics Commission, restriction of pre-release access is much more important for restoring trust than making the ONS a non-ministerial department. As former national statistician, Len Cook, put it:"““for as long as pre-release access exists on the scale it now does in the UK, then the release processes of statistics can never be considered impartial””." Ministers generally receive market-sensitive figures at least 40 hours before publication. They can receive as much as five working days’ notice of other statistics; I am delighted to hear that the Government are contemplating reducing that excessively long period of notice. As Professor Tim Holt, the former head of the Government Statistical Service, pointed out, the UK’s rules in that area,"““give pre-release access to more people, for a longer period and for a much wider range of statistics than in any other advanced country.””" The UK rules are out of line with international best practice and International Monetary Fund standards on data dissemination. Many other countries allow no pre-release at all. In countries that permit it, the notice period is considerably shorter—in Australia and France it is three hours and one hour respectively. In the US, it is 30 minutes, with access restricted to the President. As we have heard, the problems with pre-release were underlined when the Prime Minister blatantly broke the rules by leaking forthcoming employment figures in his speech to the TUC in September. Mike Haslam, of the British Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, summed up the problem well when he said: ““pre-release access gives Government an unfair advantage in presentation since ‘first with the news, makes the news’””. Mr. Haslam’s call for an end to all pre-release is echoed by the Royal Statistical Society, the Greater London authority data management and analysis group, the Audit Commission, the British Society for Population Studies and just about everyone who responded to the Government’s consultation. By specifically excluding pre-release rules from the remit of the new structures, the Government significantly undermine the credibility of the Bill. By seeking to legislate for pre-release access, they are seeking to entrench spin into law. The Opposition will oppose their attempt to do so.