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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 41: 41: Clause 8, page 4, line 36, at end insert— ““( ) The Board’s function under subsection (1) includes monitoring the consistency of official statistics across government departments and across the United Kingdom.”” The noble Lord said: At Second Reading, the Minister spoke briefly about the nature of our statistical production, calling it, "““long established and strongly supported””.—[Official Report, 26/3/07; col. 1443.]" That is certainly true, and by producing statistics at the local level, the accuracy and relevance of the data are improved, and local users can be responded to more flexibly. However,—this concentration on local statistics does not, and should not, limit the production of statistics to a standard and consistency that will enable them to make a positive and useful contribution at a national level. The response of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to similar amendments in another place was not very reassuring. In the event that the board concludes that a department is producing statistics inconsistently, he offered the following possibilities: "““The board can report its concerns to the relevant Ministers, make its views public, and report concerns to Parliament and the devolved legislatures in either its annual or a special report””.—[Official Report, Commons, Statistics and Registration Service Bill Committee, 18/1/07; col. 114.]" None of these possibilities is particularly impressive, and the department can ignore them all if the inconsistency is sufficiently to its advantage. This problem is, of course, related to the Bill’s failure to give the board real powers to enforce its code of practice. As the Financial Secretary rightly noted in the debate that I mentioned, the board can put consistency in its code of practice, but this is in essence unenforceable, and we will debate this issue specifically when we discuss a later group of amendments. The amendment would at least ensure that the Statistics Board could isolate inconsistent amendments, and it would be part of its remit to ensure that local statistics are adequate for use in the national context. I beg to move.