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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

When the Bill was published, many people wanted to support it not because it would necessarily bring every statistic into the realm of national statistics, but because it would at least increase the efficacy of every statistic by bringing it into the code. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) is right that there was little incentive for Ministers to bring certain statistics—perhaps some of the more dodgy ones—within the remit of the code on national statistics. I have used the example of Government Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland—GERS—throughout our series of debates about this matter. GERS was invented as a political construct at the outset, and there was a disincentive to have a code for it. It was inaccurate because it was designed to be inaccurate. I am very taken with new clause 4 as it does not force every statistic into the remit of national statistics, but it does force all statistics to adhere to a proper code, which is an eminently sensible thing to do when we want to have information that has efficacy, that we can all trust and that can be guaranteed. I shall refer to the example of GERS yet again, but I will not repeat the many criticisms that I have previously made of it. Instead, I shall address a recent event. A Scottish Parliament Committee inquiry discovered that Dr. Andrew Goudie, the Scottish Executive statistician, considered not publishing the report this year because of the inaccuracies contained in it, particularly the near £500 million inaccuracy in the allocation to Scotland of UK non-identifiable expenditure. If such statistics are at least forced into the code, we would end up with a situation in which never again does a senior statistician consider withholding the publication of a document because it is flawed. Instead, we would have statistics that we can all trust and rely upon. We might not have absolute unanimity on the way that statistics are measured, but at least in Scotland, England and the regions of England we would have figures that we could trust.