United Kingdom Statistics Authority

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I, too, am extremely pleased to support the motion. I speak not only as a Member of the House but as a member of the Treasury Committee. The House will be aware that we are extremely reliant on the quality of our national statistics as we supervise, regulate and seek to hold to account, at least at arm’s length, entities and agencies that are themselves extremely reliant on our national statistics. This appointment reflects very creditably on the Government for their willingness to choose, and to allow pre-selection hearings on, the highest quality candidates who can genuinely hold them to account rather than simply choosing placemen. This appointment fits into that good tradition, and the appointment of Robert Chote was another example of that.

I pay tribute to Sir Michael Scholar and also to the Public Administration Committee’s role in vetting not one but two candidates.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Would the hon. Gentleman extend those sentiments to the Mayor of London, who, when he was criticised for abusing statistics before a Select Committee of the House, reacted to the criticism of Michael Scholar by describing him as a “Labour stooge”?

[Jesse Norman]

I certainly do not share that view and I am not sure that the Mayor would share that view if he had further time to reflect on it.

Sir Andrew Dilnot is a person of impeccable personal reputation and great intellect. He has been garlanded with honours from our finest academic institutions and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Anyone who has heard him present “More or Less” or heard his outstanding podcasts will know that he is an extraordinarily apt and adept presenter of information, and therefore perfectly fits an agency with the job not merely of presenting information and ensuring its integrity but of recruiting and engaging its users.

The truth is that we in Parliament and those in government cannot survive without good information and good numbers, and the Opposition, whoever they may be, cannot survive without the numbers that allow them to hold the Government to account. I hope that an early priority for the new chair will be to look at the private finance initiative, which hon. Members will know is one of my pet bugbears. I can think of no better example than that because there has been extraordinary abuse of those statistics, with things being pushed off-balance sheet, with standards that are not of the highest quality being adopted and—I am pleased that this is being addressed by the Government—with the creation of a situation in which it is possible to have an asset that is off-balance sheet not only to the country but to PFI contractors.

Sir Andrew Dilnot is also to be commended for his outstanding report on different ways of funding the provision of care for the elderly. It would be a very poor debate that did not recognise that and congratulate him on that report. His appointment fits into a pattern of improving the governance of our public agencies, and it is a principle that could properly be extended to other public agencies whose governance has been somewhat lacking of late. I think in particular of the Bank of England, whose court needs comprehensive restoration; the Treasury Board, which could do with refreshment; and the governance of HM Revenue and Customs, which needs higher quality senior officials and non-executives.

I conclude by congratulating the Government on this appointment, and Sir Andrew Dilnot on his acceptance, on his passion for statistics and on his independence of mind. I welcome the energy, the integrity and the intelligence which he will bring to the evaluation of policy, I hope, as well as to the assessment of statistics and their presentation to the public.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

This appointment is a major development in our parliamentary procedures. This is the first time that the pre-appointment hearings made a significant difference and had an influence in changing the candidate. The pre-appointment hearings came out of an investigation in the previous Parliament by the Public Administration Committee, which went to America and recommended that certain senior appointments should be subject to the procedure. We have heard the explanation given by the Chair of how the decision arising from the interview with the first candidate resulted in a second candidate coming along and how a member of the Committee was appointed to the panel that took part in the process. These are important changes that reinforce the view that this is a useful way of proceeding. The House has behaved in a responsible manner in this process.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) referred to the forces of darkness and the queen bee jelly that takes over Governments. Some of us can rejoice in being the forces of light who were against the previous scheme and against our own Government, and are still against it and against the new Government. So often when Governments change, it is not a change of philosophy, but an exchange of scripts. Of course Governments neurotically want to hoard their secrets for as long as possible. It seems extraordinary that it was only in 2007 that the arguments were exactly reversed—when I was sitting on the Government Benches arguing with my own Government, the Tory Opposition were saying that this was the big weakness in the Bill that went through. Now they flip over without a blush.

There was a time when I recall accusing Mr Alan Clark of supervising the largest and most shameless massage parlour in London, which was the Department of Employment, in his use of employment statistics. There was some truth in that. I had an exchange of letters with Margaret Thatcher in 1989, when a group of statisticians came to see me. They were distressed because the responsibility for statistics was being moved from the Cabinet Office to the Treasury, and they rightly said, “This is our life’s work. That will reduce these pristine, glorious statistics, wonderful graphs and histograms to garbage by politicians on the make.” They suggested that the Treasury was the Department with the greatest vested interest in fiddling the statistics and damaging the result of their work. Their whole professional raison d’être was diminished by that.

Mrs Thatcher sent me a letter in which she expressed her deep shock that anyone should express the unworthy idea that her Department would want to fiddle statistics in any way. We do not feel quite that way now. There has been a move forward. I mentioned the distressing episode involving the Mayor of London. It goes to show that the advance has not been complete—not all Departments have changed their mind.

The Mayor of London was rightly criticised by Sir Michael Scholar, and we have all praised him for the way in which he did that. Sir Michael has done very well. He challenged the Home Department with great courage. He challenged the previous Government and he has challenged Departments now. He did the job that he was set to do, but when he attacked the Mayor of London, the Mayor’s reaction was not to say, “All right, I got it wrong. I’ll change the statistics”.—no humility from Boris, of course. Instead, he called him a Labour stooge. It was an outrageous thing to say, given his lifetime of independence. Michael Scholar, as all today’s contributors have said, has done a splendid job of establishing that independence, and it is what we see in Dilnot.

There are still a few old lags in the House from the passage in 2007 of the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, which went through with hardly a flicker of interest; this is a crowded House compared with the number of people who attended back then. There was only one tiny piece of interest in the press, too, but it was an article that I repeated ad nauseum to the House at the time, because it stated that it was the most important Bill of the Labour Government—we had been in power for 10 years—and would have a bigger effect than anything we had done, including handing over power and independence to the Bank of England. The article was written by a certain Andrew Dilnot, and his entire career has rightly been in that area—suggesting that statistics need to be independent.

In the Public Administration Committee, we all saw Dilnot’s boyish enthusiasm for statistics. He talks about them as “Statistics”—these wonderful things, which are the key to all happiness and the path to knowledge and wisdom—

[Mr Straw]

And employment in your constituency!

[Paul Flynn]

Indeed. I will turn to that point now.

I do have a slight vested interest in the matter, because the largest employer in my constituency happens to be the Office for National Statistics, and that is why I like to deal with the cynicism that occasionally crops up about the well-being statistics. They might have cost £2 million, but they have certainly added to my sense of well-being, because they provide work in my constituency, and we should not be cynical about them. In the past we measured happiness, success and politics on the basis of gross domestic product, but that is not a sensible thing to do, because, when the nation’s prosperity increased, unhappiness increased as well.

There was a splendid T-shirt in Hungary in 2000. On the front it said, “What has 10 years of right-wing government done that 50 years of communism could never do?” and the answer on the back was, “Made the people love socialism”. They had put up with the equality of misery, because everyone was treated badly, but when they moved to the inequality of choice they were unhappy, because young men were becoming millionaires on the stock exchange while pensions were increasing slower than inflation.

There is a crucial difference between the two, and one of the myths of politics is that choice is an example to be pursued, and that everyone will be happy if they have choice. No, they will not. I am a child of the war, when there was no choice and we wore utility clothes, but everyone was on the same level, and that was much better than what we have now, with our children wanting to wear quality, fashion clothes. All the great myths of politics are there, so it is crucial that we measure scientifically our sense of well-being.

Many points that I wished to make have been made, but it was telling of Andrew Dilnot to give us one striking example of the need for truth and honesty in statistics. He did not mention the newspaper, but most people will recognise that he was citing The Daily Telegraph, which put out a big, 36-point, front-page headline, stating, “Public pensions to cost you £4,000 a year”. It had divided £9.4 billion by 26 million and got an answer of almost £4,000. The answer is actually £400, but that particular piece of fiction was repeated on the “Today” programme and in the day’s headlines, and it became part of common knowledge which is actually common ignorance, so it is right that someone such as Andrew Dilnot should be there to take on the powerful forces that put fiction into the public domain because they are innumerate.

Mr Dilnot made a number of other points, which were entertaining, about how we should move forward. He talked about an idea called “Tell me a story”. He would suggest to schoolchildren that they go to the website of the Office for National Statistics or the Government statistical service and tell him a story about aspects of the country, but expressed in statistics.

It is a matter of great satisfaction and pleasure for my constituents that this Swansea boy should have been upgraded to Newport—a matter of some congratulations. He can work in Newport under the benign observance of a quality MP, and I am sure that he will be extremely content. The hugely successful relocation of the ONS to Newport can continue and prosper. Gales of applause will be coming up the M4 today as a result of the House’s decision, which I am sure will be to reinforce the decision of the Public Administration Committee to appoint Andrew Dilnot as the best possible candidate.