United Kingdom Statistics Authority

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), although I am not sure how I am going to follow some of the details that he mentioned. It will be a challenge for Mr Dilnot to find a statistical measure for happiness; I am not sure that he will find reliable data for that.

I start by welcoming Mr Dilnot’s appointment. I pay tribute to the Chair of the Public Administration Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). The process has shown that pre-appointment hearings should not always be simply to ratify the Government’s appointment. There should be a possibility that the proposal will be rejected and that the process will have to restart, and the occasional rejection should be seen in the context of the advantages that the process offers us.

Any politician will know how important statistics are. Soon after I was selected as a candidate, around the time of the change in the law, in early 2008, we used some crime figures in a leaflet. A couple of months later, I was phoned up by someone from the local newspaper, who said that the police authority was challenging the data that we were using. It cited some very different figures and had no idea where the figures that I had used came from. It turned out that my figures were from the most recent British crime survey and the authority was using police data. What was slightly unfortunate was that it used crime data for the year that ended two days previously—I could not possibly have used that in my leaflet, which had been printed two months before, and not even in the same year.

In retrospect, I was grateful as I got a front-page headline and a decent amount of publicity. The vast majority of correspondence said, “You’re right—we don’t believe a single figure that they tell us anyway, so we’ll happily go with the ones that you cited.” That sums up the public mood about official statistics—they just do not believe them, probably because all politicians tend to manipulate them, get them wrong or selectively use some that suit the argument and omit those that might go the other way.

It is a real job to make public the data used and make it clear when they are abused by politicians. We should all base government and policies on actual evidence, rather than on what we would like the evidence to be; we should make the policy fit the data, not the data the policy. It is ironic that, in a debate about the probity of the data we use, we have had comments about child poverty data. That is one of those footballs that we can kick back and forward. What data do we want to use? Do we compare 2005 to 2010? Some of the numbers show child poverty going up by 300,000 and some by 100,000, or we can say that it has gone up since the election. The hon. Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher) wandered into that argument. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) gave a far more balanced view: we have to be careful that we use realistic, accurate data that present a meaningful picture, rather than the one that we want.

I agree with the Minister that the person who heads this authority needs to be credible, senior, and, most of all, independent. If we are to have a Parliament that can effectively hold Government to account, we need reliable, honest, accurate data to be available to all of us so that we can do that job properly. I truly hope that Mr Dilnot can take that process forward. I, too, cannot see much justification for the Government’s having 24-hour advance access. I hope that the Public Administration Committee can make some further recommendations when it looks at that, because probably one of the last great abuses is our being able to see stories appearing in the press that rely on statistics that we have not seen.