Letter from Chairman of the Committee
to Jil Matheson, National Statistician, 26 November 2009
INQUIRY INTO OFFICIAL STATISTICS: 2011 CENSUS
QUESTIONS
Thank you once again for giving evidence to
the Committee on 19 November in your new role as National Statistician.
I am writing now to invite you to clarify a point you made in
the evidence session regarding the procedure to approve the draft
Census Order.
You suggested during the session that if Parliament
wanted to add new questions to the Census, it would need to reject
the draft Order and start again:
Ms Matheson: I think there is a procedural
point, which Glen was going to remind me about, which is that
this is a strange Order in that it is partly subject to affirmative
resolution and partly to negative resolution, so the only way
of adding would be to reject the Order and then to start again.
(Q 126)
This is consistent with the usual 'affirmative
resolution' procedure. Our understanding, however, is that the
case of the Census Order is different. Section 1(2) of the Census
Act 1920 provides for modifications to the relevant parts of the
draft Order to be made subject to the agreement of both Houses
of Parliament. Such modifications could, as we understand it,
include the addition of new questions, and I am told that there
is a precedent for this from 1980. This leads us to believe that
it would therefore be possible for Parliament to add new questions
to the Census without rejecting the draft Order now before it.
I and the Committee would be grateful if you
could confirm for the record that this is also your understanding
of the procedure regarding approval of the draft Census Order.
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