Draft Official Statistics Order 2018
(5 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chloe Smith)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Official Statistics Order 2018.
It is a pleasure to be here today and to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I shall begin with the purpose of the order and take the Committee briefly through what we are considering. The order updates the list of non-Crown organisations that produce official statistics, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Statistics are, of course, a pillar of democratic debate. They allow for a window on society and the economy and enable people to judge the performance of Government. They are fundamental to the decisions that people make in their lives every day, whether that is at home or at work or, indeed, when they are, quite rightly, scrutinising the Government, and in this House. The code of practice for statistics plays a very important role in ensuring that producers of official statistics inspire the public confidence that everyone wishes for by demonstrating trustworthiness and providing high-quality statistics that enhance public value.
The order revokes and replaces the Official Statistics Order 2013, updating the list of UK non-Crown bodies that may produce official statistics. Let me give the briefest of contexts for the order. From December 2007, the Statistics and Registration Service Act established the non-ministerial department the statistics board—known as the UK Statistics Authority—as an independent statutory body, to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. The Act’s definition of official statistics allows the flexibility to add non-Crown bodies to or remove them from the authority’s remit by order. This order provides an updated list of bodies whose statistical activities will be monitored, scrutinised and reported on by the authority.
The authority will work with those bodies designated as producers of official statistics to promote good practice for the production and publication of official statistics, including through the code of practice for statistics; to monitor and report on the production and publication of official statistics; and to assess the treatment by producers of official statistics against the code of practice and to publish the results of those assessments. If statistics comply with the code, the authority will designate them as national statistics.
It is important that the changes are applied to UK-wide and English organisations. There have been four previous UK orders, in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2013. Regularly updating the orders ensures that the scope of official statistics remains accurate and relevant in the light of the establishment, abolition or name changes of public bodies. Section 6 of the 2007 Act provides that Scottish Ministers, Welsh Ministers or Northern Ireland Departments can determine that statistics produced by non-Crown bodies are brought into scope. There have been equivalent orders for Wales in 2013 and 2017, for Scotland in 2008 and 2010, and for Northern Ireland in 2012. I can give details of those should the Committee need them.
I am sure that fellow Members will agree that it is an important move to designate these bodies as producers of official statistics to bring them within the scope of the code of practice for statistics. To return to my point at the outset, that will help to provide assurance that the statistics produced by them are trustworthy and are of high quality and public value. The purpose of this order is to specify the organisations subject to the code of practice.
Let me explain exactly what changes the order makes. It is important to note that although the order covers a wide range of bodies, which are listed in the schedule, the vast majority were already designated under the previous order, so this order is a very minor adjustment. It adds four new bodies to the list in the 2013 order. Those are Monitor, the National Health Service Trust Development Authority, the Office for Students and the Service Complaints Ombudsman. Monitor and the NHSTDA are the main organisations that make up NHS Improvement.
The instrument also alters the name of one body that was contained in the 2013 order, following a legal change to the body’s name: the Rail Passengers’ Council was renamed the Passengers’ Council by order in 2010. The instrument removes no bodies from the existing list.
The UK Statistics Authority was consulted in preparing the order, in accordance with the Act, and is content for it to be laid. My Department has laid the order on behalf of other Government Departments, in preference to each Department laying an order for the bodies for which it is responsible. That is intended to make best use of parliamentary time.
In conclusion, the order updates the list of bodies subject to the UKSA’s oversight. That is in order to capture the value of official statistics to society. Some, such as the authority’s inaugural chair, have likened the necessity of good statistics to clean water and sound money. I am sure the Committee appreciates both of those.
I thank all those who have worked on this and who work for the UKSA for their important role. I hope the Committee will join me in agreeing the order because it will play a vital part in maintaining public confidence in the code of practice, the UKSA and the statistics themselves.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Paisley. Clean water, sound money, good statistics and fair chairmanship—you have certainly provided the last, Mr Paisley. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time; I earnestly hope it is not the last.
I thank the Minister for a clear interpretation and explanation of the order. We broadly welcome it and will not seek to divide the Committee. The order updates the list of applicable organisations in line with developments since the original legislation was passed and subsequent statutory instruments.
I have a couple of concerns that I ask the Minister to address. Will she confirm that there are no charities on the new list of orders and that these are all existing Government bodies of one sort or another? Since these statistics will now form the basis of official statistics, and therefore must be accurate, credible and reliable, will any additional support be given to the bodies concerned to ensure that they are able to meet the standards required, and that their core work of undertaking responsibilities will not be suffer as a result?
The current legislation is designed to ensure that we have an independent statistics authority that can challenge the use of statistics where necessary. If the body concerned is receiving Government grants or is in any way over-reliant on Government, will that reduce the capability to challenge the Government with hard-hitting statistics? Will the Minister provide assurance that the independence and credibility of these bodies are maintained? Dare I say it, the Government have some form in this area.
Finally, on a more general point, many of the public do not trust official statistics. The British Social Attitudes survey, conducted by NatCen Social Research, found that large majorities of people question the presentation of figures, ranging from unemployment to crime levels: 90% of people trusted the Office for National Statistics to produce accurate statistics, but just 26% said the Government would present those accurately.
We know that several hon. Members associated themselves with the bogus claims of the leave campaigns in the referendum, about £350 million being sent to the EU. The official statistics watchdog had to rebuke the Vote Leave campaign for those. As recently as March this year, Sir David Norgrove, the chair of the UKSA, rebuked the Prime Minister herself for the use of misleading figures on police funding.
In conclusion, we have a Government who, having changed the definition of poverty, are now using Government statistics to tell us that we are now a more equal society, despite the fact that food-bank usage has gone off the charts: 5,000 families in my own West Cheshire area alone are using food banks, while the Sunday Times “Rich List” tells us that the richest 1,000 people have increased their wealth by £466 billion since the crash. According to the TUC, the average worker will have lost £18,500 in income.
In that context, it is no surprise that folks do not trust what they are told by official figures. What will the Minister do to re-establish faith in the use of Government statistics?
The Chair
As I see no tsunami of people wanting to make a contribution, I call the Minister to respond.
Chloe Smith
Thank you, Mr Paisley. I welcome the Opposition’s support in principle for the order. I will endeavour to answer the hon. Gentleman’s questions, to give reassurance to the Committee.
On the question of the charitable status or otherwise of bodies in the list, hon. Members will have seen the following on page 3 of the order, in the explanatory note that follows it:
“The persons listed in the Schedule include a number of registered charities, but this Order does not impose any additional burdens on them.”
To throw a little more light on that for the Committee, I should say that the great majority of bodies have already been scrutinised by Parliament for being in the order. I do not believe that the four we are adding today, which I named earlier, are charities. The overall framework that we are operating is set out by the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.
To make that distinction a little clearer, I should say that “official statistics” as a term already covers statistics produced by Government Departments or organisations at that level—persons acting on behalf of the Crown. The 2007 Act then makes provision for an order to specify such other statistics as may be included in that specification. That is what we are doing today: we are updating the order that does that.
On the question of whether that means that there is a genuine question for debate about the role of charities in the list, I dare say that Parliament has done that already by virtue of having looked at the order in the past. We are looking to get to a high quality set of information that is of public value. If it should be that organisations of various types come near that definition, that is the matter of our debate today.
The hon. Gentleman also rightly asked whether the independence of these organisations will be reduced by their being included in the order. The very opposite is true. As I hope I made clear in my remarks, we are talking about including bodies under the umbrella framework of the best quality statistics. We are talking about a code of practice—a proper framework—through which we can inspire public confidence by these statistics being of the best quality and being available, designated as official, for use for or against the Government or any other body or person in the land. That is the point. We are talking about the very stuff of independence and quality. That is what we are trying to achieve by bringing appropriate bodies into the ambit of this framework.
The hon. Gentleman also asked whether the bodies in question might require any additional support. Certainly, they have been consulted on these changes through the relevant Government Departments, so I am confident, in bringing forward the order today, that the bodies to be added are appropriate, that they will be able to manage this role and that the code of practice and umbrella framework provide the support and guidance so that we have statistics of the highest possible quality in a way that people can trust.
The UK Statistics Authority is the key because it is an independent body that has the right to intervene at its own discretion on matters of statistics. It is responsible for a huge range of material, and we can all take confidence in its independence and ability to head up the framework that we are looking at today.
I hope I have given the hon. Gentleman the reassurance he was looking for. I thank you, Mr Paisley, for the brevity and clarity that I hope we have been able to get to in the Committee and I commend the order to the House.
Question put and agreed to.