Digital Economy Bill

Lord Rowe-Beddoe Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rowe-Beddoe (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak in support of the provisions around statistics in Chapter 7 of Part 5 of the Bill. Before I do so, I want to say that I—mostly—warmly welcome the Bill. However, as discussed today by your Lordships, there are a few considerable warts which will need to be addressed at a later stage of the parliamentary process. It is indeed a mammoth piece of work. To pick up on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, I do not think that it is a Christmas tree so much as a forest of conifers. I would have preferred it to be somewhat divided, although joined at the end, but I dread to think how long it might take to go through the House.

Perhaps I may take your Lordships through some statistics. The Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, and the framework that it established, is extremely close to my heart. I will stop short of saying that it is under my bed but it is very much in my study, although it is now almost nine years later. I shall give the House a brief historical context. Between 2008 and 2012 I had the honour of being the founding deputy chairman of the UK Statistics Authority under the excellent and insightful leadership of Sir Michael Scholar and, latterly, Sir Andrew Dilnot. The authority is very close to my heart and I have never forgotten how important and internationally recognised a legislative instrument it is, promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics for the public good, and, most importantly, doing so free from political interference for the first time.

The 2007 Act delivered on the then Government’s desire to improve public confidence in official statistics. It established the authority as a body independent of government, reporting directly to Parliament, with a majority non-executive board and with two important functions: first, overseeing the Office for National Statistics as our national statistical institute and the UK’s largest producer of economic and social statistics; and, secondly, establishing an independent public regulator, now known as the Office for Statistics Regulation, to ensure that the use and reporting of official statistics remains fair and objective, and to promote public confidence in their trustworthiness. These roles, I suggest, are vital but they are highly complex.

As an independent regulator of statistics, the authority must at times make some very difficult decisions about when it is necessary to intervene to correct the record. This role provides Parliament and the public with the assurance that our official statistics are trustworthy and that we can have confidence in the numbers, produced by professionally independent statisticians, that describe what is actually happening in our society and our economy. As our statistics regulator, the authority watches closely to ensure that all those who use and quote official statistics do so accurately.

As mentioned at the outset, the authority’s other important statutory role is to oversee the Office for National Statistics—to guide it and support it, but also to challenge it to ensure that it delivers the very best for all users of statistics, wherever they may be. Statisticians want to tell a numerical story that is trusted and understood, and to help decision-makers take timely and informed decisions for the prosperity of our country; including, if I may say so, decisions sometimes taken in your Lordships’ House.

I know from first-hand experience just how challenging that work is: measuring the modern economy, counting the population, and producing aggregate statistics and analysis when decision-makers need and expect them. We all rely therefore on the ONS to produce statistics and analysis on the labour market, migration, crime, inflation and the state of our economy, and to keep pace with innovations in world-leading data science and statistical methods. Clearly, to be able to do this challenging task, the ONS relies on data—and now noble Lords might see the relevance of me taking the House through a little historical detail. Those data come from a rich array of different sources, many of them surveys of individuals, households and businesses. However, surveys are costly to administer and place burdens on those who are asked to respond to them. Ensuring that the ONS has a sufficient number of survey responses to report accurately what is happening in the world in which we live is becoming not only more logistically challenging but also very expensive.

In the world of the digital revolution, which everyone keeps saying we are now living in—I am told it is the fourth industrial revolution—surveys seem a little old-fashioned and outdated. The notion of armies of people —and indeed, they are out there—knocking on doors with clipboards and forms, collecting data, feels like something of a bygone age, like punch cards, slide rules and ticker tape. Simply relying on surveys seems to be relying on an analogue instrument in what is now, after all, a digital world. Of course, there will always be a need to undertake surveys, to fill in the gaps that other sources cannot fill. However, so much of the data that statisticians need have already been collected and are held somewhere else, often within government. The problem is that current legislation makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for the ONS to access those data sources for the purposes of producing statistics. That is precisely what this Bill is designed to sort out—to give the ONS access to the data it needs to produce the statistics we need.

As much as I love my treasured, old, battered copy of the 2007 statistics Act, it has, inadvertently, as the years have passed, put up significant legal, procedural and cultural barriers that currently prevent the ONS from accessing the administrative data sources needed to produce the statistics and analysis we demand of it. These barriers are inhibiting the ONS from transforming, preventing it from playing its full part in the data revolution, and slowing the pace of reform of the statistical evidence base on which Britain relies to take better, more timely, well-informed decisions. I hate to tell noble Lords, but we are now lagging so far behind many of our international partners in making available the sources of data that our statisticians need to produce statistics. We must do better to support them; we must help to sort this out. It is for all our benefit.

As Professor Sir Charles Bean, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, so eloquently observed when he published his recent report on UK economic statistics:

“It’s nonsensical that different bits of the government don’t speak to each other, so that businesses and households have to provide the same information twice. Unlocking the data hoard already held by the public sector will not only save … money but also”,

enable the ONS to,

“produce more timely and accurate statistics”.

As the National Statistician, John Pullinger, said earlier this year in setting out the case for why new legislation is needed:

“If the UK is to succeed in the competitive global marketplace, and if our governments are to make good choices affecting all our lives, they need to be well informed. Better statistics support better decisions. Statistics will be better if they mobilise the power of the data revolution. To do so requires a modern legal framework that enables us to deliver statistics that serve the public good in ways that sustain public trust and business confidence”.

One of the questions raised in the House today by the noble Baronesses, Lady Byford, Lady Hollins and Lady Janke, was that of security and protection. When data are being transferred, they need to be properly protected. Will the Minister assure noble Lords of the robustness of the current safeguards that exist and ensure that it will be a priority that such protection will continue going forward?

We want our professional statisticians to succeed and to contribute their very best so that we can understand our society and economy through numbers. They want us to understand the world in which we are living and our place in it. It is time to give the UK Statistics Authority the tools to do its job and that is why I commend to the House the important provisions on statistics set out in the Bill.