I speak to oppose this Order. We've already got 19 official statistics providers specifically for Wales, as the Minister described, and we're now seeing Digital Health and Care Wales added to them. As the Minister rightly says, some of its tasks are coming from the NHS Wales Informatics Service and Velindre NHS trust, but as far as I'm aware, neither of those organisations are being deregistered from this process, and we have another new official statistics provider as part of what the health Minister terms the 'NHS Wales family'.

I find it's getting increasingly difficult to navigate through statistics that previously used to be presented on a consistent basis across the United Kingdom. The Minister talks about having statistics on an all-Wales basis, but actually, if you compile your statistics on an all-Wales basis, according to the procedures of these 19, now to be 20, bodies, they tend to diverge from how statistics are compiled elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The Minister rightly mentions that bodies that do this should be trustworthy, with high-quality  statistics that the public value. Very sensible. I think they should also be statistics that allow comparison across the United Kingdom, and not just within one of the nations. The Minister talks about having accountability for Welsh Government, but the reality is that this divergence in statistics makes that accountability less and less, because we can't compare how the Welsh Government is doing compared to elsewhere.

The Minister mentioned some of the work the ONS was doing on COVID, and I think we should recognise actually what a fantastic job the Office for National Statistics has done—and 'national' in that context means national, the United Kingdom. It has had a survey across all four nations, I believe, which has provided very useful information around prevalence, and has done so in a really quite timely way. Before the ONS took that up, health organisations who were doing this, whether they're here or elsewhere in the UK, did not do the job with the quality and standard that we've seen from the ONS. So, I think we should recognise what they've done.

I'm concerned, as we have more and more statistics providers doing their own statistics and doing them on a Wales basis, rather than a UK basis, that we undermine the Office for National Statistics ultimately—based in Newport, and something that we in Wales should be very proud of, and in the region of south-east Wales we are very proud of. I don't think it's a good idea to have more and more statistical divergence. We should have the ONS in charge and they should organise statistics more on a UK basis, and we should have less divergence and more consistency. So, for that reason, I recognise this as a small step on the road, rather than a major one, but nonetheless we'd like to put down a marker and oppose this Official Statistics (Wales) (Amendment) Order 2021.