Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 12 November 2020
We have heard some away-with-the-fairies speeches this afternoon.
It is strange that pre-release access to Government statistics was enjoyed for eight years by our predecessors, who are now sitting over there on the Labour benches, and still is by the Tories in another place, but it is only when the SNP Government has the same privilege that it becomes a problem. What has taken them so long to come up with that? I think that they have been exposed by their points of view on that today.
It has been interesting to hear the different perspectives on a subject that could have been sorted out some time ago with perhaps a little compromise. Whether to continue to grant pre-release access to Scottish ministers to certain classes of statistical data, or whether to alter that arrangement, is not exactly up there in the list of priorities of the Scottish people at the moment. My constituents in Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley email me daily about plenty of issues, but I am fairly certain that this is not one of them. However, here we are.
I have read the committee’s report, and I am still a little confused as to what its members wanted. Three strands or alternatives were suggested, with varying adjustments to the current arrangements. Perhaps splitting them up like that did not help a great deal, and the committee then being further split did not exactly lend itself to providing a clean simple view on how to take all of this forward. The offer of a compromise from the Government at the time may have been too late in the day and it seems that it did not make much of a difference.
What is the stushie all about? It is about whether the Scottish ministers, and presumably those others who get the same access, should get pre-release access to certain classes of economic data and, if so, to what data and exactly how long in advance.
The chief statistician has made his position clear: that pre-release access is correct and appropriate in order to allow ministers to make informed comments about statistical data, and that it is important for good governance.