That brings us to the official statistics Order. Apologies to the Minister. The Minister can now move that Order. Rebecca Evans.

Motion NDM7661 Rebecca Evans

To propose that the Senedd, in accordance with Standing Order 27.5:

1. Approves that the draft The Official Statistics (Wales) (Amendment) Order 2021 is made in accordance with the draft laid in the Table Office on 2 March 2021.

Motion moved.

Diolch, Llywydd. I am pleased to introduce the Official Statistics (Wales) (Amendment) Order 2021. The power for the Welsh Ministers to make the Order is contained in section 6(1)(b) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Section 65(7) of that Act states that the Welsh Ministers may not make the Order without approval by the Senedd.

The purpose of the amendment Order is to designate the statistics produced or to be produced by the newly created Digital Health and Care Wales as official statistics. Doing so offers assurances that the statistics they produce are trustworthy, of high quality, and of public value. It also means these statistics will then become subject to monitoring and reporting by the UK Statistics Authority. This official statistics Order-making power was first exercised by the Welsh Ministers in 2013, when five bodies were listed. A further Order was made in 2017, to include an additional 14 bodies across different sectors in Wales. This amendment Order reflects the transition of both the functions and the staff of the NHS Wales Informatics Service from Velindre NHS trust to the new body.

The importance of, and public interest in, official statistics and data more generally has been highlighted through the pandemic. The publication of official statistics and management information around COVID-19 involves a number of organisations alongside Welsh Government, notably Public Health Wales, who are already named in the Order, and the NHS Wales Informatics Service. NWIS do not directly publish COVID statistics or management information themselves, but provide data to support their publication, for example, vaccination information from the Welsh immunisation system. It is, therefore, important that DHCW, as a successor organisation, continues to work within the context of official statistics and the code of practice. The Order enables Digital Health and Care Wales to publish data as official statistics when they consider it appropriate and when robust arrangements have been established to do so.

Official statistics provide a window on our society, inform decision making and enable the public to hold Government to account. This Order ensures that the new body responsible for delivering digital health and care services for patients and the public in Wales will provide high quality, trustworthy statistics that will help to inform and shape the well-being of future generations. I ask Members to support the Order. 

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.

The Minister for Finance to reply. 

I'm grateful to Mark Reckless for his contribution to the debate this afternoon, although obviously we come from very different perspectives. I think it's important that we do have robust Wales-level information and statistics and data available to us in order to help the Welsh Government to make good decisions, but then also to allow others, including Mark Reckless, to hold the Welsh Government to account. I think that transparency and independence in the production of data and statistics is absolutely critical and that's what this Order allows to happen in the case of Digital Health and Care Wales.

It will also provide assurance that the information provided is of a very high standard and that it's trustworthy and of good public value. I think it's also important to reflect on the fact that the Welsh Government has an excellent working relationship with the Office for National Statistics. Clearly, we have frequent discussions about the kind of information that we require here in the Welsh Government and the ways that we can work together to ensure that information from all its sources is useful and can be compared in useful ways as well. So, I don't think that there's any tension there in terms of having specific Welsh data whilst also working within that wider context. On that basis, I would encourage colleagues to support the Order this afternoon.

The proposal is to agree the motion. Does any Member object? Yes, there is an objection, therefore, I will defer voting until voting time.

Voting deferred until voting time.