This week there was more oral evidence on statistics taken by the Public Administration Select Committee: 
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-administration-select-committee/inquiries/parliament-2010/communicating-and-publishing-statistics/
Chris Giles (FT), Michael Blastland and Will Moy (Fullfact) gave evidence which is worth watching. There was also a further session with Andrew Dilnot and Jil Matheson and it was good to see the committee stepping up to a bit more challenge. However, before that came evidence from Nick Hurd whose brief in the Cabinet Office covers UK Statistics. I must admit, I had no idea, but searching for the contribution he has made I could not find anything related to policy on statistics. As far as I was aware, Francis Maude did that. This was the first time he had met the committee in this role despite holding the brief fomore than two years. He didn't seem to know much about it - that was the main conclusion of the press reports. The chair, Bernard Jenkin, made the rather surprising ( for its humility) statement that the committee were learning about statistics and advised him to do likewise as they viewed it as very important. As part of their discussion, Mr Hurd stated that no one had ever raised a concern with him about the functioning of the Statistics and Registration Act. While this may be that nobody knew he had any responsibility or even that there was still a government contact on this issue, I suspect that the committee has not helped by never drawing attention to this role until now. Mr Jenkin was keen to resolve this, suggesting that people had raised concerns with him about the Act. He invited anyone watching to contact the Minister and the committee to ensure that concerns were acknowledged.
I thought I would pass on the invitation - this discussion occurred at around 10am in the evidence from the Minister on Tuesday. This might be an opportunity for those with specific concerns who did not want to go to the trouble of submitting written evidence to raise more specific difficulties.
The inquiry continues and will go on into the summer it seems as the is a call for evidence on migration statistics presently, and there are still issues like census and open data to come.
If anyone could identify anything the Statistics Minister has done (not in relation to open data - he seemed to know about that) I should be grateful to know.
Tom

Centre for Research Excellence in Child Language
http://www.mcri.edu.au/research/research-projects/centre-for-childhood-language/

Department of Speech and Language Sciences
Newcastle University
+441912226510
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The Royal Statistical Society's Statistical Literacy Campaign
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