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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

We have tabled a similar amendment in this group to reflect the concerns of the Royal Statistical Society, which feels that the Bill if anything weakens the current rules that enable a coherent framework to be established and implemented. The current framework for statistics requires the National Statistician to produce a high-level business plan for all national statistics, not only for statistics from the Office for National Statistics. There is no such requirement in the Bill, so there appears to be a weakening. I have no doubt that the Minister will say that this is yet another unnecessary amendment and that everything is fine. We beg to differ.