FOI Reference: FOI/2022/3992
You asked
Sir David Norgrove, in his session with the IfG on 7 March, said (when discussing possible disputes between the production and regulatory sides of UKSA): "I'm clear that if there ever were to be a conflict between OSR and ONS or other statistical areas, OSR, the regulatory side takes precedent."
Can you please publish the rules, law, guidance or other evidence to support that statement. The 2007 Act appears to give precedence to the National Statistician. Section 30(1) says: "The National Statistician is to be the Board's principal adviser on— (a) the quality of official statistics, (b) good practice in relation to official statistics, and (c) the comprehensiveness of official statistics."
The only exception, where OSR does have precedence, is on the relatively narrow and precise issue of compliance with the code of practice (see section 12 (1)). The Act indicates, and the working assumption had been, that on the many other issues that would be decided upon by the CEO/NS relating to quality, good practice and comprehensiveness, it would be wrong to give precedence to the views of the regulatory side. Issues such as, but not limited to, funding for the OSR; choosing what domains to horizon scan; the role of users in decision-making; the content of UKSA letters/speeches; the content of business plans, annual and other reports; staffing and work planning matters; the use of external advisers; and decisions about what statistics to collect, it would be wrong to give the views of the regulatory side any precedence.
We said
Thank you for your request for supporting information relating to Sir David Norgrove's statement at the Institute for Government (IfG), "I'm clear that if there were to be a conflict between OSR and ONS or other statistical areas, OSR, the regulatory side takes precedent".
The statutory roles of the National Statistician and the Director General for Regulation (also known as the Head of Assessment) and their respective offices, as well as the responsibilities of the Chair and Board in governing both, are set out in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.
The comments were made in response to a question on whether or how those responsibilities might interact. As Sir David went on to say in his response at the IfG, "People tend to think of it as a bit of a zero-sum game in the way that say, Ofgem or Ofwat, where if you're determining the rate of return for a company that you're regulating it's a zero-sum game as between you and the consumers that you represent. That isn't the case in statistics. If you think about it, both the producers of statistics and the regulators have the same objective, which is statistics that serve the public good."
The approach proposed by the Chair to a potential conflict is a long-standing position, having been set out in his pre-appointment hearing before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in 2017 where he said, "It is a matter of demonstrating the strength of the support for the regulatory function and making sure that if there is a conflict, the regulatory function always takes precedence."