---

Statistics and Registration Service Bill

No, I am not. I am saying that because such decisions have been so muddled and blurred, with the Comptroller and Auditor General saying one thing and the national statistician saying another, with arguments about which PFI liabilities are contingent and which are not, and which should be classified on the balance sheet, and with the process of serendipity whereby revisions are made very late in the financial year while being perceived as being influential on the operation of the fiscal rules, it is all the more important that we tackle head on the question of the perception of Government statistics. Those are not just my allegations—the outside world made them at the time. I could draw the Economic Secretary’s attention to a leader in The Guardian—I do not know if that was a paper he used to write for—that harped on precisely that point as we went into the March 2005 Budget.