Draft Official Statistics Order 2023
(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Official Statistics Order 2023.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. The order updates the list of non-Crown organisations that produce official statistics as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. The Government and UK Statistics Authority want to see official statistics enabling sound policy decisions and providing a firm evidence base for decision making both inside and outside Government.
The code of practice for statistics plays an important role in ensuring that producers of official statistics inspire public confidence by demonstrating trustworthiness, quality and value in the statistics they produce. The order revokes and replaces the Official Statistics Order 2018, updating the list of UK non-Crown bodies that may produce official statistics. From December 2007, the Statistics and Registration Service Act has allowed the flexibility to add non-Crown bodies to and remove them from the authority’s remit by order.
The order provides an updated list of bodies whose statistical activities will be official statistics and so will be monitored by the authority. The authority will work with bodies designated as producers of official statistics to promote good practice in the production and publication of official statistics. It will monitor and report on the production and publication of official statistics, and assess the treatment of producers of official statistics against the code of practice, at their request, and publish the results of those assessments. If the statistics comply with the code, the authority will designate them as “national statistics”.
The changes are applied to UK-wide and English organisations. It is important to designate the bodies as producers of official statistics to bring them within the scope of the code of practice for statistics. That will help to provide assurance that the statistics they produce are trustworthy and of high quality, and have public value.
It is important to note that although the order covers a wide range of bodies listed in the schedule, the vast majority were already designated under the previous order, so this order makes a very minor adjustment. It adds five new bodies to the list in the 2018 order: the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Regulator of Social Housing, Skills for Care Ltd and the Trade Remedies Authority. It removes five bodies that are no longer legal entities from the list in the 2018 order: the Health and Social Care Information Centre, the Higher Education Statistics Agency Ltd, Monitor, the National Health Service Trust Development Authority and the Natural Environment Research Council.
The order also alters the name of two bodies that were contained in the 2018 order: the National Health Service Commissioning Board is now recorded as NHS England, and Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary is now recorded as His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services. The UK Statistics Authority was consulted in preparing this order in accordance with the Act and is content for it to be laid. My Department laid the order on behalf of other Departments in preference to each Department laying an order for the bodies for which it is responsible. That is intended to make the best use of parliamentary time.
Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I thank the Minister for his very brief opening speech. Since the start of the year we are just 15 short of 1,000 references to statistics in Hansard—I hope that our debate today will make it 1,000.
The frequency with which statistics are used in our debates shows the tremendous power and influence that they have over our politics and political system. They provide a vital pulse on the education of the nation, helping us to determine the success and failures of policies and concentrate minds on the areas of concern.
The statistics referenced in the Commons come from a variety of sources, from charities and lobbying groups to data collected by the Government and many arm’s length bodies. That is perfectly healthy. Statistics should not be excluded from the official sources that we are discussing today. Statistics from unofficial sources allow for a variety of opinions, novel methods and original research beyond the purpose and scope of official statistics, but it is also useful to highlight when statistics are from official sources, as they come with certain guarantees of methodology and central authority that are rooted in the public good. This measure allows us to have a certain understanding about the country, and forms the basis of the commissioning of statistics by the Government and Ministers.
I am pleased to say that we do not oppose the specification of “official statistics” as continued under this instrument, and we understand the need to update what counts as statistics as and when public bodies transform in structure, or where there is a need for or redundancy of statistics in certain areas. As the Minister pointed out and the explanatory memorandum outlines, the vast majority of the changes in this order are simply organisational, representing names, mergers and similar changes in structure.
I would just like the Minister to respond to one question. The only outlier on the list is the Natural Environment Research Council, which the Minister briefly touched on. NERC has been merged into UK Research and Innovation without UKRI being granted the official statistics change. It seems strange to drop an official statistics status for an environmental research body without replacing it, but I understand that NERC did not produce much in the way of statistics. I also understand why it may not be appropriate for UKRI as a whole to be included at the moment and that there are no great calls to change that. However, will the Minister confirm that sufficient statistics will be produced in the environmental field through bodies such as the Environment Agency?
More widely, although we do not disagree with the concept of official statistics, it is important to highlight that they still have limitations with consequences that we should be aware of in policy development. Statistics can reveal a great deal of information about the state of the nation but, if we are honest, they can also leave out a lot of nuance and things that are hard to measure or quantify. It can be easy to fall into the trap of finding the easier-to-quantify measures in a subject area and then work to simply reduce that number, while failing to address the root cause of the problem or help those who fall through the cracks. We do not need to get into specifics today, but it is important that we treat all statistics with caution and study the methodologies and gaps as much as we study the headlines. I will leave it there, but I would be grateful if the Minister could briefly address the omission with respect to the NERC.
Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)
May I ask the Minister one question? He said that the UK Statistics Authority’s role is to check the quality of the statistics produced by bodies, but does it also require them to produce statistics on certain issues that are not currently being covered? For example, a year ago the Pensions Regulator was not collecting statistics on how many pension schemes had invested in leveraged liability-driven investments, which nearly crashed the economy last autumn. We are a year on and still do not know how many pension schemes lost out by having invested in such instruments. Is there a way that the authority can use its powers to require the bodies in this orbit to collect statistics that we need to monitor the health of the economy?
Alex Burghart
We have had a wide-ranging and engaging debate. In answer to the question from the hon. Member for Vauxhall about the Natural Environment Research Council, as I said in my remarks, NERC became part of UKRI in 2022, so it is no longer a legal entity and therefore ought to be removed from the order. Its removal was approved by the former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and by UKRI itself. The Department confirmed that the Natural Environment Research Council does not produce official statistics, and engagement with UKRI confirmed that that organisation should not be included in the order.
I am happy to write to my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley on his point about pensions, and I will ask the authority what the position is.
Question put and agreed to.