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Statistics and Registration Service Bill

I do not want to go over the ground that has already been covered by my noble friend Lady Noakes, so I will be brief. However, I should like to suggest to the Minister at least one reason why the arrangements in Clause 30 are unsatisfactory. It is not the habit of chief executives to be told that they may not have anything to do with part of the organisation for which they are executively responsible. Chief executives reckon that the buck stops on their desk. If, for example, when I was chairman of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I had told the incoming director that there was a large chunk of the gardens’ operations for which he would have no responsibility, I would have had trouble concluding a contract with him. While I can see that if the three-day chairman is to be the public face of the Statistics Board—to guard the code, to be responsible for the board’s detailed relationships with the Government and the person who deals with the media—he or she will need advice. However, the presence of a second executive member with the title of ““Head of Assessment”” alongside the National Statistician, who is to be the chief executive and yet is to have no working relationship with the head of assessment, is a recipe for trouble. Any highly qualified chair would be able to deal with these matters without the intervention of such a prescriptive clause, put in the Bill no doubt in pursuit of continued Treasury control. I suspect, from the discussion so far, that if the clause were not there and an amendment was put forward to include it, we would be told that it was too prescriptive and not needed.