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Lord Renton of Mount Harry: My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving way. On the point raised by myself, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend Lord Bridgeman, there is great concern about the suggestion in the five-year strategy that no appeals will be allowed for students coming here to attend college or university. There is a genuine belief that that will turn off a lot of overseas students from trying to come here at just the time the universities need them. Will the Minister please ensure that this point is taken up with the Home Secretary?

Lord Rooker: My Lords, I shall give a response because the point has been raised previously. The noble Viscount referred to the orders that I took through the House last summer with the House's support. If I can get to that matter, I shall certainly do so. If not, I shall write to everyone who has participated in the debate.

The noble Lord, Lord Waddington, raised the issue of sham marriages and bogus colleges. It is true that there have been both in the past and that there are probably both today. We are dealing with it. We have brought in new regulations. In the first two quarters of 2004, registrars reported almost 2,300 suspicious marriages. However, with the new enforcement system, that has fallen to around 1,200 in the past two quarters. Legislation introducing the certificate of entitlement to marry, which was much debated in this House, came into force on 1 February 2005.

Action has been taken over visits to colleges. Some 25 per cent were found to be non-genuine. We have carried out visits when adverse information is received. There are some issues relating to students and colleges which we ignore at our peril. That is not an answer to the noble Lord, Lord Renton, but the issues are being raised.

I shall not repeat all the figures. The overall immigration level is low compared with other countries. A speaker quoted from a letter from the United Nations High Commissioner. The figures were very similar. In this country, our net migration is about two migrants per 1,000 natives. That is about the same level as Germany, which is about 1.7. In 2003, the figure was 2.66. The figure is lower than the USA and Australia, with 4.5 migrants per 1,000 natives.
 
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It is also worth pointing out that almost 2 million people of working age move between European countries each year—and rightly so. We are an international community for people moving round. The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, gave a graphic description of the situation.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, asked about Lindholme. We put together action plans on both reports from the Inspector of Prison. In particular, refurbishment programmes currently under way will be completed by April. We remain committed to pulling out of Lindholme when alternative accommodation is identified. We are putting into place a service level agreement between the Prison Service and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to sharpen accountability for operation of the centre.

On TB, the noble Baroness asked about testing and health checks. In 2003-04 some 400 people were diagnosed with TB at Heathrow and Gatwick making it the highest imported infection risk faced by this country. All we are doing is looking to have those checks carried out before people enter the country. The fact that that system provides an incentive for people to be checked for TB and, where necessary, to be treated will be of benefit to countries with high rates of TB. We are not damaging the countries which people come from. However, it is an issue that we ignore at our peril.

The right reverend Prelate and many other noble Lords raised the issue of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It is a very sensitive issue, and I cannot do justice to it. We take our responsibility for children extremely seriously. I think that I have told the House that, when I visited ports of entry as a Home Office Minister, I came across cases in which children had clearly travelled on a plane with an adult and had then been abandoned and the paperwork destroyed at the airport. The children were left wandering around. It is an incredibly difficult situation. We think that it is in the best interests of such children to reunite them with their family, if we can, and find acceptable reception arrangements in their own country. By and large, it is not in their interests to be separated from their parents or their country.

I may have read the wrong figure out: I gave a figure of 400 cases of TB. I apologise: it looks like it is 100. I had better get that checked before I am on the receiving end of a lot of correspondence. It is still a high number.

I was asked whether the Government would reimburse local authorities for costs incurred as a result of ending support for the failed asylum-seeking family. We have always made it clear that the Government will reimburse local authorities for costs incurred in taking a child into care as a result of the withdrawal of support. However, as was made clear lots of times in both Houses, we do not expect that to happen in many cases, as the intention of the policy is to encourage families with no right here to return but not to render them destitute. We do not want to split families up.
 
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The noble Lord, Lord Lamont of Lerwick, made several points. I doubt that I will be able to deal with all of them. The current situation is that the Treasury estimates that forecast migration accounts for about 15 per cent of the trend growth forecasts. On average, migrants—I was surprised at this, but these are the figures that I got from the Treasury—have higher average wages than the native population. In fact, they are about 19 per cent higher than those for UK-born workers. I was unaware of that. That is a benefit. We think that we can improve productivity in any case and fill the labour shortages.

Several speakers raised the issue that is constantly raised of allowing asylum seekers to work. There is no possible change of policy on that; it would simply send all the wrong signals down the line. A large number of asylum seekers make unfounded claims: we know that. I accept what has been said: we have to improve the initial decision. There is no question about that, and we are conscious of it. However, we do not want to create an incentive. We want people who want to come to the country to work to use one of several managed migration routes, not the asylum process. If they do not, they gum up the system for the genuine asylum seekers whose cases are being considered. I do not say that they slip through the net, but they get in the way of dealing with those who are fleeing persecution under the terms of the 1951 convention. They are coming here for economic activity, and we want them to come in for that.

I shall finish on this point, which, I hope, will deal with the issue of students and appeals. We do not take the view that appeals in all areas are a right. Those refused can, of course, apply again. Under the new proposals, we will improve and extend independent monitoring of our entry clearance process. The efficiency and quality of the first decisions must be vastly improved. There will be other measures to improve performance. However, some issues—I have not got a note here, so I will make sure that it is in the letters—can be issues of fact; they are not all subjective. If you do not have the money or if the college is not registered, the position is clear. Why would there be a right of appeal? If a college is not registered, that is a matter of fact. We do not want spurious appeals gumming up the system. People have the right to reapply, if they want, but there are some areas in which there is no basic, intrinsic right of appeal.

We want to stop the three levels of appeal that were inherited. The system was played with, and people remained longer than they would have otherwise, creating families and doing other things that, on humanitarian grounds, made them more difficult to remove. I shall cover that point in the letter that I shall write.

I was asked many other specific questions. I shall make sure that they are properly answered. They deserve to be, if only because of the quality of the debate that we have had today. I am grateful to everyone for it, including the noble Lord, Lord Waddington.
 
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6.25 p.m.

Lord Waddington: My Lords, we have had a most interesting debate. I am grateful to all noble Lords and noble Baronesses who took part and to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for his robust and spirited reply.

I have had my say, and I know that the House would not welcome it if I were to say any more. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Official Statistics

Lord Marlesford rose to call attention to the adequacy of official statistics for the determination of policy; and to move for Papers.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, as we work our way through life, as politicians, civil servants, people in some other public role, people in business or mere citizens of a state, we never really know where we are going, let alone where we will end up. It is, however, helpful to know where we have come from and, if possible, where we are. It can help to guide us on the route ahead and, perhaps, give warnings of obstacles and precipices in our path.

The main value of statistics is to help with such much-needed guidance. They therefore fulfil a noble and crucial role in national life. Their accuracy and, above all, their integrity are the measure of their worth. A particular responsibility of government is to identify the information that is needed to guide public affairs and to use the statistical facilities to provide it.

Let me use a general example from the private sector. It is probably a mere half century since businesses realised that cash flow was an essential tool to ensure that they remained viable. In some form or other, cash flow is now used almost universally. It is even less time since the government of the day realised that rapidly rising inflation was making the old Plowden system of the 1950s—planning public resources in volume terms and making the cash available through parliamentary supplementary estimates, usually passed on the nod—was no longer viable and was contributing to financial catastrophe. That was in 1976, which followed the infamous year in which inflation in this country reached 26 per cent. The conclusion was that there was a need to introduce cash limits to control public spending.

The credit for that great change was certainly not due to the then Chancellor, the noble Lord, Lord Healey. It should go to Sir Leo Pliatzky, the then Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. As a journalist on the Economist, I used to discuss the problems with Sir Leo. It was a useful link for me and had come about because I had suggested in that paper that there was an urgent need for the government to introduce cash-flow controls.

There is now public disquiet about the relevance, accuracy, validity and, indeed, integrity of the use of some statistics in the conduct of government business and the formulation of public policy. That is why the
 
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Opposition have decided to have this debate today. The Omnibus Survey shows that two-thirds of the general public believe that figures are changed to support an argument and that mistakes are suppressed. I think that they are right. Over half believe that there is political interference in the production of statistics. I think that they, too, are right. On 28 February the Office for National Statistics and the independent Statistics Commission are each publishing a report on this serious situation.

There are so many examples of misleading or misused government figures. I start with two fundamental examples from the heart of government—the Treasury. The first I owe to my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford who described it so well in his book, The Edge of Now. It relates to the decision on 4 June 1998 of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England to raise short-term interest rates yet again. A crucial factor in the MPC decision was that the ONS figures had shown that earnings were rising alarmingly in the service sector of the British economy. It subsequently transpired that the figures were substantially wrong and a great deal too high. The collection, sampling and evaluation were all to blame. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee subsequently issued a sharply critical report on the affair.

My second example is bang up to date. It refers to the remarkable decision announced in January to reclassify the expenditure on the repair and maintenance of roads—a very large sum—as capital rather than current expenditure. Some might suspect this transfer of expenditure from above to below the line, which is so helpful to the Chancellor in his struggle to balance the books before the election, is just too much of a coincidence.

Frankly, the explanation given by Mr Len Cook, head of the ONS, in today's Financial Times makes no sense at all. The idea that any private sector enterprise would be prepared to have maintenance costs of any capital assets, whether buildings, roads, plant or machinery as capital expenditure, and therefore disallowed for deduction against trading revenue, and thus for tax relief, is absurd. It flies in the face of the need, which I hope the Minister will confirm, for public finances to be subjected to the same disciplines as private finances whenever possible.

That is essential so that proper judgments can be made in national resource allocation. Otherwise, we could once again descend into the socialist morass of pre-emption of resources for public purposes without that discipline of which our cautious Chancellor is so proud, and which the EU stability and growth pact rules are supposed to underwrite.

I should mention to the Minister that yesterday we had his honourable friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury along to Sub-Committee A, and I raised the matter with him. One of the Treasury officials helpfully said that Eurostat will be commenting on the point. I am not sure that Eurostat is held in great regard for its integrity at the moment, although it did a good job in establishing that the Greek Government's deficit for 2003, which was originally reported as 1.7 per cent of
 
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GDP, was in fact 4.6 per cent. We are all well aware that the head of Eurostat, M. Yves Franchet, along with some of his staff, had to be removed for some rather doubtful financial behaviour. It may be that Eurostat is not the answer to our problems.

That brings me to what we as a party have proposed. My right honourable friend Mr Oliver Letwin, has published our framework for financial accountability, together with a national statistics draft Bill. Under this radical approach we would make the ONS independent, responsible directly to Parliament, with at its head a national statistician who would be an officer of the House of Commons. It would not collect the data but would analyse it and have a central role in planning statistical activities across government. The auditing of the validity and integrity of government statistics is well overdue.

I underline the importance of the Government getting the statistics that they actually need for the formulation of public policy. That means asking fundamental questions as to what figures are actually needed, and for what.

Let me give an example. Recently, I elicited through Written Answers, the astonishing fact that it would appear that in 2003-04, Defra's Rural Payments Agency, which has the job of paying and administering the CAP schemes, had a gross cost of £3.6 billion before making payments under the IACS scheme of £1.6 billion. It thus apparently cost more to run the scheme than the scheme gave to farmers. Surely someone in government should have worked out the cost-effectiveness of the wretched CAP. It does seem to me to be a prima facie reason in favour of the renationalisation of farm support.

I do not have time to go into the many other areas in which the Government have had completely inadequate statistics. Immigration is one example. I listened to part of the previous debate, when again and again statistical problems were the key to what was needed. Another example is the lack of an adequate exchange of data between the National Register Office and the Passport Agency, which I have discussed with the Passport Agency. Further examples are the needs of the National Health Service; penal policy problems, that were so well highlighted by Sir David Ramsbotham in his deeply disturbing book, Prisongate; and education results, to mention but a few. Perhaps the biggest failure was the lack of early warning for a policy change. The demographic changes should have caused the Government to face up much earlier to the need for the change of retirement age.

I conclude with three proposals. First, there should be a review of all the figures that are collected in terms of their current relevance rather than their historical importance. For example, do we need all those figures collected from farmers that date from a time when agricultural had a greater importance in the national economy? Secondly, the collection of statistics should help the private sector as much as the public sector and local government as much as central government. Thirdly, Ministers should constantly ask themselves
 
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what statistics they really need to know to run the country properly. I would call that a creative approach to statistics planning.

I have a final thought for the party that got to power and has remained in power to a significant extent through its considerable—indeed enviable—skills of presentation. It is ultimately bad politics to mislead the electorate by playing fast and loose with figures. It is bad government to mislead yourselves in the same way. I beg to move for Papers.

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