Oral Answers to Questions

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

The hon. Lady is completely right that we need an ICT transformation. What we inherited—the legacy—was a series of extremely expensive, opaque IT contracts. The Government did not even know what they were getting for what they were spending. We need to reform that. We must wait for some of these contracts, which were excessively long, to come to an end. That process is beginning. The British Government were spending more on IT per capita than any other Government in the world, yet our rankings, until recently, were falling. There is much to be done, but she is in no position from where she sits to be lecturing this Government, who are grappling with the issue.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

3. What steps he is taking to ensure the accuracy of Government statistics.

[The Minister for Civil Society (Mr Nick Hurd)]

The UK Statistics Authority was established to promote and safeguard official statistics for the public good. As the hon. Gentleman knows, it is an independent body directly accountable to Parliament, and it is responsible for assessing and monitoring the accuracy of Government statistics against the code of practice for official statistics.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Estimates by the TUC and others of uncollected taxes—the so-called tax gap—are some three times higher than those figures given by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Government. Are the Government simply massaging those figures downwards to disguise how appalling they really are?

[Mr Hurd]

I would like to think that this Government, unlike the previous one, are not in the business of massaging statistics. The central point is that we now have, as a result of the lack of credibility of statistics under the previous Government, the official UK Statistics Authority, which does an excellent job in safeguarding the integrity of public statistics.