Independence for the Bank of England has been one of Gordon Brown’s most successful policy initiatives. Independence for the Office for National Statistics seems an equally admirable proposal. But independence for the Bank of England meant, broadly, what was said.  Independence for the Office for National Statistics means, broadly, the opposite of what is said.  What a difference ten years in office makes!

       The period since 1980 has eroded the credibility of all government information.  Episodes like BSE and the treatment of intelligence reports on Iraq mean that even ostensibly factual official statements can no longer be considered objective accounts of events.

Within this context, official statistics have particular problems of their own.  The Rayner Report of the early Thatcher years, drawing on a mistaken analogy between official statistics and management information systems, advocated that substantially reduced resources for government statistical services should be targeted on provisions mainly designed to meet the specific needs of government departments.   But official statistics are not the same as government statistics.  As well as meeting the requirements of policy makers, they feed the process of democratic accountability.

       Government statisticians are honest people.  They don’t make numbers up.  They do not receive or respond to instructions as to what numbers to report.  The issue of independence is not one of whether ministers theoretically have the power to issue such instructions.  The problems of independence, and compromised independence, are more subtle.

       It sounds easy to count the unemployed.  But the spectrum of people who could be considered unemployed ranges from those who would quite like a job if an attractive offer came along to people who devote themselves full time to the search for work.  The two main ways of measuring unemployment – reviewing benefit claimants and surveying households to ask whether anyone in them is actively seeking work – give different answers.  The question ‘what is the level of unemployment?’ has many different answers, none clearly right, or wrong.  Each of the many adjustments made to unemployment statistics in the 1980s was, on its own, individually defensible, but the overall result was to present a more optimistic picture and to make comparison over time increasingly difficult. 

More recently, the Treasury has twice shifted the goalposts for assessing the ‘golden rule’ – for measuring the tightness of fiscal policy.  Again, the alternative measure is defensible.  But no one can overlook the fact that the guidelines would have been breached if these amendments had not been made. 

Similar stories can be told across the range of government statistics – the confusing plethora of inflation indices, the exclusion of PFI and other public liabilities from government borrowing, the controversial measurement of public sector output and efficiency.  Most statistical questions can be answered in more than one way.  If some answers are greeted with approbation and others are not, then very little knowledge of human nature is needed to realise what will happen.

       What is collected matters as much as how it is collected. We live in a world in which service industries predominate, most economic growth takes the form of quality improvement, and environmental concerns multiply. Official statistics don’t inhabit that world.  National statistics have adapted too slowly to changing national concerns, 

The absence of good information on immigration from the accession states of Eastern Europe creates a large gap in our understanding of labour market trends.  Both the EU and the British government understated the potential impact in the years before accession and have failed to monitor it subsequently.  Both policy and politics require the collection of the most relevant data, not simply the data that has always been collected, or the data that politicians want collected.

       These issues are, for most people, dull and boring.  No one would talk of sexing up figures for government borrowing.  The difference between arithmetic and geometric means of price relatives will never make the Today programme.  I have struggled for years to interest people in the impact that hedonic pricing of computers has on the difference between US and European GDP, without success, although the issue probably accounts for more of the difference in reported productivity growth rate than any difference in economic policies.

       The only way of resolving these questions objectively is through skilled, independent professional judgment.  The Bank of England and the judiciary act independently primarily because prestige and preferment depend on the esteem of colleagues, not the approval of politicians.  Independence is a state of mind, and the state of mind is the product of institutional arrangements, but is not simply a matter of institutional arrangements.  If a judge had to notify a decision to the Home Office a week before delivering a verdict in court, or the Monetary Policy Committee had to give the Chancellor of the Exchequer forty-eight hours notice of a change in interest rates before announcing it, then the relationship between politicians and these public servants would be changed fundamentally, and it would be changed whether or not the politicians enjoyed the final power to require that the decision be modified.  That is why the issue of pre-release – Britain is exceptional in giving ministers advance notice of statistical releases well ahead of their announcement to markets and the press – is so important.

The leading individuals in the Bank and judiciary – the Governor, the Lord Chief Justice – enjoy high status which does not depend on continued public approval.  Career progression in these bodies is outside the normal channels and criteria of the Civil Service.  Neither body is engaged in a battle for resources which can be damaged by unhelpful public comments. 

       These things were once true of national statistics.  They are not true any more, and the government’s proposals for so-called independence will keep it that way.  The role of the National Statistician is to be diminished rather than enhanced.  Statisticians will continue to shift between ONS and departments, and responsibility for the greater part of government information will remain within departments.   Pre-release will continue, and the Treasury will continue to hold the purse strings. The main existing source of professional oversight of ONS work – the Statistics Commission – is to be abolished, having made the mistake of actually being independent.

       The Commission will be replaced by a non-executive board.  If that board were appointed by and accountable to Parliament rather than government, if its responsibilities were primarily professional rather than managerial, if the Board were composed mainly of distinguished academics and heads of other national statistics agencies, if its  members devoted sufficient time to engage with questions of detail and if the Board had proper oversight of the statistical work of departments as well as of the Office for National Statistics itself, then it would be credible that its supervision could gave junior statisticians the confidence needed to insist that professional judgments made and presented in a detached and objective way.  But none of this is intended, or likely.

       The blunt truth is that the proposals to give greater independence to national statistics consist of little more than repetition of the phrase independence for national statistics.  Since almost everyone is – publicly- in favour of independence for national statistics, respondents to the consultation almost unanimously began by welcoming the principle of independence while criticising the specifics.  The government has claimed this shows wide support for the proposals but, since there is an almost complete disjunction between the stated objectives of the bill and the substantive content, this response is disingenuous.  These proposals, and the manner of their presentation, only compound the mistrust they claim to alleviate. 1252