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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

When the issue arose in another place, as my noble friend has just described, I recognised that I was not familiar with ““hedonic regression””. I therefore asked the Library here if it could make me a report, which it did. It was a good quarter of an inch thick and contained a huge amount of material, which sat on my desk for a number of weeks before I felt that I no longer had any room for it. It is a hugely complex concept that can affect the measurement of both the retail prices index and the consumer prices index, and I should think that it is one of those things that very few people, apart from the noble Lord, Lord Moser, and others who are and have been deeply involved in statistics, understand anything about. I must say that, despite the evidence that the Library was able to give me, I am still not much the wiser. However, I accept and reinforce the point that my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising has made that, if the Chancellor is going to withhold consent from a change that the board feel is necessary to measure the RPI, that should be transparent and should therefore be reported. I hope that the Government will see the sense of that and be able to accept the amendment.