POPULATION AND HOUSING CENSUSES (6768/07)
Letter from the Chairman to John Healey
MP, Financial Secretary, HM Treasury
This proposal was considered by Sub-Committee
E at its meeting of 25 April 2007.
We support initiatives to ensure the collection
of relevent comparable data at European level and like you broadly
welcome this Regulation. However we agree that it raises a number
of concerns.
We would be interested to hear in more detail
why the UK may have difficulties meeting an obligation to provide
statistical outputs on non-core topics. Is the reason financial
or is there a wider concern regarding the potentially discouraging
effect collection of non-core statistics may have on those required
to provide them?
We note the Government's position as requires
anonymised microdata. We consider that such data could be usefully
collected, but agree that matters of security of access and confidentiality
should be considered and provision should be made in the Regulation
to ensure compliance with data protection rules.
Does the Commission now accept that it should
undertake a full impact assessment before this proposal progresses
further? It seems to us that this would be a very useful exercise
and it is surprising that it has not already been carried out.
We have decided to hold the proposal under scrutiny.
26 April 2007
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