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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

We had an earlier debate with the hon. Member for Sevenoaks about the potential for differences of view between the independent head of the Office for National Statistics and the independent head of the National Audit Office. In our view, there would be no gain in having two separate independent institutions additionally—one to produce the statistics and another to scrutinise. Given that the production of statistics is an important technical and intellectual matter but that it does not require the same kind of difficult political decisions as would be involved in, for example, decisions by the BBC, and given that the role of the board is to scrutinise quality but it is not a regulator in the sense that the BBC is a regulator, in our view it was possible to combine both functions—ensuring proper professionalism in production and providing proper scrutiny of quality—in one board. Therefore, it was decided that it was right to have a single, unified, independent statistical service, and that is the basis on which the Bill has been produced.