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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I am apprehensive about the subsection, because it could be used to ease out non-executive members of the board who had somehow displeased the Government. They could say, ““Would you go, and we’ll pay you some compensation?””. I am afraid that one has at the back of one’s mind the not very salutary case of Sir Alistair Graham, who is not having his appointment as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life renewed and appears simply to have fallen out with Ministers in Whitehall. If ever there was a chairman of a committee who ought to have felt in an impregnable position when making his strictures, without the risk of losing his job, I should have thought that it would be somebody who held that kind of appointment. My anxiety is that, if the Government have a statutory right to pay compensation to somebody who is leaving office prematurely, that power could be misused. I agree with my noble friend on the Front Bench that it would be better if this subsection did not exist.