Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 March 2021
Not at this stage.
Two hundred years ago, a politician wrote the 21-volume “Statistical Account of Scotland”, an undertaking said to have required the labour of Hercules combined with the patience of Job. The author, Sir John Sinclair, saw it as an inquiry
“for the purposes of ascertaining the quantum of happiness.”
His view of its relevance to the public was that it was
“the means by which their temporal and eternal interests can best be promoted.”
Then, as it is now, data could be a guide to the decisions affecting us, and the Economy, Energy and Fair Work Committee believes that it should be available on an equal and not a privileged basis. That is the premise of the committee’s bill. As the president of the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the First Minister last September,
“Quite simply, allowing a government privileged access to official statistics risks undermining public trust … it creates opportunities for figures to be ‘spun’ to the media or ‘buried’ beneath other announcements.”
The bill would do three things. It would remove pre-release access for two categories of economic data, take a phased approach to that removal and review its impact, and reduce to one working day the pre-release access for statistics where five is now the norm. Let me elaborate.