Official Statistics Order 2023

Debate between Lord Davies of Brixton and Baroness Lawlor

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is appropriate for us to have a debate on this instrument. It is worth noting that the Commons dispensed with it in seven minutes. Perhaps the Front Bench is hoping for a similar record here but I will delay us for a little bit. Sorry, I am wrong; it was nine minutes.

The debate on postal packages caught me unawares; I thought that we would all be finished by now. Still, this is an important issue and I wanted to have my say about statistics, as I am interested in that sort of thing. Unfortunately—I apologise to the Committee for this—I did not do as much preparation early as I had intended. I shall ask questions that, of their nature, will be fairly technical so I shall indulge the Minister if she is unable to answer everything fully. It would have been a good idea if I had asked for a meeting before this debate; a meeting after the Summer Recess may be a helpful way forward but we will see.

We have these things called official statistics. There are actually two tiers of them because there are national statistics as well. As I read the rules, it has to be an official statistic before it can be a national statistic, and whether something is a national statistic is a matter of practical importance. It is not just a technical clarification; it makes a difference. This is a completely different issue, which I am not seeking to debate today, but the fact that the RPI is not a national statistic but an official one has an impact on the way in which policy is determined.

My problem is that I am still not totally clear what the point of an official statistic is. There is a certain circularity in the definition—important statistics are official statistics and official statistics are important statistics. It is quite difficult to break out of that loop and try to identify from published material what the criteria are by which official statistics are decided, what difference they make to the operation and what impact they have. I saw a claim somewhere in the documentation that there is an overarching policy on the scope of official statistics. If it exists, I have failed to track it down. It would be good to have a clear explanation online.

All this stems from the 2007 Act. In their wisdom, the legislators at that time decided that this order required the affirmative procedure, which to me means that they thought this was an important issue that required political review. I looked at the Explanatory Notes for the Bill; although there is an explanation of Sections 5 and 7, unfortunately there is a gap for Section 6 in the background explaining this legislation. It jumps straight from Sections 1 to 5 to Sections 7 to 21. It is a bit difficult to see what was in the legislators’ minds at the time about what exactly was the point of official statistics.

However, we have them now. We have this list of 40, if I am counting right. One by one, they all look entirely reasonable, although the sorts of bodies vary widely. The difficult thing is to spot which organisations are missing. I turned to the government website and looked up government bodies. Apparently there are 604, and here we have 40. The obvious question is why these 40 were chosen and the others excluded. There may well be good reasons but we do not know what they are, because there is a singular lack of clarity over the criteria and purpose of official statistics.

The Explanatory Memorandum to this order says that there was consultation. The way it is worded implies that it was the department—the Cabinet Office—consulting the UK Statistics Authority, but in practice it was plainly the other way around. This is all generated by the UK Statistics Authority. It consulted the Cabinet Office and all the departments, pulled all the information together and drew up this list. But it does not tell us what it said to departments about why they would want to put forward these public bodies to have official statistics status and not others. We just do not know what the criteria are, as far as I can tell. Maybe I am missing it; I hope the Minister can draw my attention to it.

So I got 604 results, and I looked through them all. We can dismiss the 24 ministerial departments; they are the Government, so they are included automatically. The non-ministerial departments are included—there are 20 of them. But 425 were described as

“Agencies and other public bodies”,


of which 33 are on the list—I went through them, and they raised all sorts of questions. I could go through all 390-odd remaining bodies and ask about them one by one, but I will save your Lordships that. Still, there are some that I do not really understand.

One oddity that I will mention is that the Financial Conduct Authority is included, but it is a subsidiary or part of the Bank of England, which is not. Another one that I was surprised about was the Certification Officer, which is very important as far as trade unions and employers’ organisations are concerned. It is not on the list, but one would have thought that its statistics were of some importance. The Electoral Commission is not on the list, and neither is the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which has had some controversy. The list does not include the Secret Intelligence Service, but I think we can let them off that one. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch seems an obvious candidate to me. Of course, it is of interest that the Office for National Statistics is not on the list, but that would have been a bit self-referential. So there are questions about why only a limited number are included and many appear to be excluded.

One particular oddity is that included in the list of 40 is the Service Complaints Ombudsman. Why is that ombudsman included in the list when the seven other ombudsmen—whatever the plural of them is; is it “ombudsmen”?—are not? We do not have the Housing Ombudsman, the Legal Ombudsman and so on—noble Lords get the point. Yet another oddity concerns public corporations; should they be included? On the government website, there is a list of public corporations, along with other lists of public bodies and so on. Only one public corporation is included in the SI: the Pension Protection Fund. Others are not. The National Employment Savings Trust Corporation, which in many ways is very similar to the PPF, is not included. The Post Office is not included, nor is the Oil and Pipelines Agency.

Once you start poking and pulling a thread in this tapestry, the whole thing, to my mind, starts to unravel. I have made my point and I hope it is clear. I suggest that the Minister does not try to respond on every single item I included in the list, but it would perhaps be helpful to have a meeting after the Recess to go through this and set my doubts at nil.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend the Minister comment on where, if not under these regulations, one can find out who decides the measures that will be included in official statistics by any of the authorised bodies?