Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 12 November 2020
No, I have hardly any time left—my apologies.
It is part of the day job that ministers do for the whole country. People expect them to get facts and figures correct when challenged. The risk is that hurried statements, made with little time to assess the significance of data or the messages that it contains, can lead to inaccurate interpretation and ultimately may bring into some disrepute the statistics themselves and the process by which they are derived and released.
As I understand it, the Scottish ministers offered a compromise of restricting their access to economic statistics to 24 hours, but that was not enough for the committee at the time. It might have been too late in the day to get that through, so the committee decided to introduce its own bill—and here we are.
We have heard the views of members who want all that to change, but in the time remaining in the debate I would like to hear why the advice of our chief statistician is not good enough for them.
Of what benefit would it be to the public whom we serve to alter the current pre-release access arrangements, which have been in place here for the past 12 years—and, as I have said, since before then—without causing any upset to them? I hope that there is substantial and worthy effort in pursuing that. However, I will always be happy to compromise if that is still possible this late in the day.
With that, Presiding Officer, I will draw my remarks to a close. I look forward to listening to the remaining contributions and the summing up, which I hope will bring the debate to a happy conclusion.
17:00