All Government statistics should be published by an independent body whose Board is appointed by a panel of designated charitable and professional bodies associated with the collection and use of statistics.

People need to believe their political leaders but Government credibility has been much reduced because of the spin culture.  In a 2008 survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), only 36 per cent of people thought that official figures were 'generally accurate'.

Government statistics in the UK have long had a reputation for spin. In the 1980s changes in the rules affecting entitlement to unemployment benefit led to charges that the Thatcher Government were fiddling the statistics.  That controversy led to the inclusion of a pledge in the Labour Party's 1997 Election Manifesto to create 'an independent statistical service'.  

A Statistics Commission was set up in June 2000 'to advise on the quality, quality assurance and priority setting for official statistics, and on the procedures designed to deliver statistical integrity, and to help ensure official statistics are trustworthy and responsive to public needs.'  However it clearly did not amount to anything like 'an independent statistical service'. Although it was independent of ministers it had no authority directly to influence any statistics and was solely involved in procedures. It made some good progress within its limited remit but public concern about statistical spin increased.

There continued to be many examples of ministers abusing official statistics. In 2001, Stephen Byers' special adviser sent round an e-mail at the time of the 9/11 attacks in New York to say that it will be 'a very good day to get out anything we want to bury'. Another much-publicised case was when the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, became involved in a row on spin with claims that his special advisers tried to bury the announcement of poor primary school test results.  The Statistics Commission told the department to stop special advisers having any influence on the publication of official figures.

In 2003, in his first political publication since retiring as an MP in 2001, the former Prime Minister Sir John Major denounced Labour spin in a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies.  He also said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph:

'Spin is the pornography of politics. It perverts. It is deceit licensed by the Government. Statistics massaged. Expenditure announced and reannounced. The record reassessed. Blame attributed. Innocence proclaimed. Black declared white: all in a day's work.'

A 2005 survey unsurprisingly demonstrated that 64% of people still did not have confidence in the information presented by ministers on the basis of the data collected by the ONS.  In the light of the various scandals which had taken place the Government had to accept that the ONS would become a Parliamentary agency outside any direct ministerial control.  A new UK Statistics Authority came into existence and was billed by ministers as making the governance of national data independent of ministerial control for the first time.   However although the new Statistics Authority has the theoretical responsibility for safeguarding the quality of all official statistics it does not have any commensurate authority over any statistics produced by Government departments.  More than 80 per cent of all Government statisticians do not work for the ONS but for individual Government departments and similarly about four-fifths of all official statistics designated as 'National Statistics' are in fact produced by those individual departments.  The Authority Code is not even binding on all Government bodies.   

Other countries have faced a similar problem but have had the governance structures and political will to put in place a credible system for producing all Government statistics.  For instance the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is responsible for producing statistics for all federal Government departments.  

This should be the model for the Statistics Authority in the UK in order to improve the credibility of Government measures.  This will be a substantial dislocation with the departments losing their separate statisticians but there is no doubt that these people will be much more protected from political pressure if they are in a central ONS rather than depending for their careers on their superiors in their particular department.  It is therefore a priority of the Jury Team to sort out the provision of Government statistics, to ensure that they can never again be contaminated by party politics and therefore to establish a fully independent Statistics Authority directly responsible for all Government statistics.

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