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United Kingdom Statistics Authority

It is a great pleasure to endorse the recommendation that Andrew Dilnot be made chairman of the UK Statistics Authority. I had the pleasure—indeed, the honour and responsibility —of serving on the selection committee. I cannot say too much about what went on in the selection process, but his performance was, as the chairman said at the pre-appointment hearing, stellar—and in a very strong field. We have got exactly the right person in Andrew. Before saying more about Andrew Dilnot, I want to say something about Sir Michael Scholar. I agree with all the compliments paid to him this afternoon. Indeed, I praised him publicly at the Public Administration Committee when he came before us in the previous Parliament. The fact that he has been criticised by—or perhaps I should say that he has slightly disturbed—politicians on both sides of the House shows that he is even-handed. However, I think that he was just being truthful when he criticised special advisers in the previous Government for misusing statistics about knife crime. I am sure that they were not pleased, and they may have privately said that he was a Tory stooge—who knows? The fact that he has now upset the Mayor of London and has been accused of being a Labour stooge suggests that perhaps he is nobody's stooge. Perhaps he is just his own man, telling the truth as he sees it, and that is what we want in a chair. He has done a splendid job. Sir Michael has drawn attention to the fact that official statistics are not held in high regard by our voters. In a recent public lecture at Oxford university, he said that we came bottom of the league table in our attitude to official statistics and that our electors do not trust them. That is a very serious matter. In my view, our official statistics are of very high quality, and they should be trusted, but it is their misuse by Governments and by the media that leads to their being mistrusted. I think that I was appointed to the Committee because I have some modest experience of statistics; I studied the subject and used to teach it at a modest level. I used to show my students how one can use statistics to tell fibs, in a sense, by distorting things; one can exaggerate the vertical scale to make it look steeper than it should be, and so on. People can try all sorts of tricks to make statistics tell the story that they want to tell. The great thing about the UK Statistics Authority is that it will present the statistics raw, and truthfully. If they are misused, it is up to the authority to point that out from time to time. I entirely agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), the former Justice Secretary and Home Secretary, said about pre-release. Let us get rid of pre-release and we will solve some of these problems. We can then all see the statistics as they come out and make of them what we think, not get it all pre-digested by politically interested, politically motivated Governments of both sides. Sir Michael has pointed out that we have to raise the status and the opinion of official statistics with our electors so that they are trusted. I personally trust official statistics, and I trust the splendid people who work in Newport in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn). I have visited their headquarters and spoken to them many times, and they are clearly public servants who can and should be trusted. We want to ensure that the population at large regards them equally well. I have had a long association with Andrew Dilnot, because long before I was a Member of the House I used to attend the pre-Budget presentation by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which he led. It was always a splendid occasion, and the statistics and analysis that the IFS produced were always first class. I still receive its green budget reports—in hard copy, I am afraid, because I am old-fashioned—and always pore over them with great interest. I am one of those people who are fascinated by numbers and statistics. I like nothing better for Christmas than a book full of statistics that I can spend Christmas day entertaining myself with. People might call me an anorak, but I believe that numbers are important. The great thing about Andrew Dilnot is that he has a passion even greater than my own for statistics. The passion that he showed in the interview was almost as though he were talking about great works of art. Statistics tell truths if they are accurate and presented truthfully, and his enthusiasm and passion for statistics as almost works of art inspired us all. I believe that we have the right person for the job. I agree entirely with what the Chair of the Public Administration Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), and a number of other Members have said about Andrew Dilnot. I could not attend the hearing, because I was a member of the selection committee, but I am sure his performance was as exciting and stimulating as it was at the interview. It was a great pleasure to be involved in the process, and I think we have got exactly the right person for the job.