Speeches by Carling.

“So at this point, are you saying that the board is not so much concerned about the design of the survey but about the timeline for switching over?”

“Just for time reasons I will curtail that line there because we have what we need from that.”

“In what month, roughly?”

“Thanks. As the Chair has said, I am just trying to build up a timeline here of all these reviews that say very similar things and when they happened.”

“So we have from March 2023 to September 2024. Sir Robert, can you just remind us what you said just now in terms of when you found out about the 2023 report?”

“That was before the subsequent exercise on culture that has just been mentioned. So when you found out about this in May 2024, you took it to the head of people and said, “Why didn’t we see this report?” The response was, “Oh, things have moved on; a board discussion isn’t needed on it now.” But actually things had not…”

“I am interested to understand a little more about the board’s input into the TLFS process and at what point the board started to ring alarm bells. Sir Robert, you said last time we met that the board had intervened on the issue. At what point would you say you became aware that the early designs of the TLFS were not re…”

“The reason I ask that question is that you clearly have a lot of deep-seated organisational problems within the ONS that need some work, and your work as the OSI is broader and covers lots of different organisations. I just wonder if there is almost a need for more board time and focus that might benefit from a split.”

“My final question is for Mr Humpherson around the overall governance structure at the UKSA. The board structure seems to be pretty unique in terms of the OSR and the ONS reporting to the same board, despite the OSR regulating the ONS. Is that working?”

“I was going to move on. I would just ask my final question at that point.”

“When was this done?”

“I just wanted to nail down one point from what Sir Robert said, Chair. In discussing the report just here, you mentioned that there was a subsequent exercise on culture. What was that?”

“Notwithstanding the fact that you took that action and commissioned the Devereux review, I am not quite grasping why the board did not push back and say, “No, we should have seen this report and discussed it. We still need to have an opportunity to discuss this report because it isn’t clear that action has been taken o…”

“Did you make a point to the head of people that this should have been flagged to the board?”

“But you said that at some point the board should have discussed it?”

“I appreciate that is the later on stuff. What I am really keen to understand is to what extent stakeholders were properly engaged at the start of the process.”

“If I may I will just come in there, Chair, as we did not necessarily hear the answer on a couple of the points there. Sir Robert, when you approached someone in the organisation and said, “This report’s happened; can the board see it?” you said they did not say no but essentially rebuffed you. Who was that? Who did you…”

“It might be helpful if you are able to write to us later with some more details just to the extent to which they were being consulted on the detail of what data needed to be included, what their key objectives are and what they are using the data for so we can understand if they were being involved early on. One more t…”

“The other issue we have here is that Sir Ian, the previous National Statistician, also did not seem to have been aware of the issue of declining response rates until—going back to the Treasury Committee meeting—he said either September or October of that year. Irrespective of the board not necessarily knowing the exact…”

“Did it express any concern? Did it write to the accounting officer? Did you write to the accounting officer? Did anyone just say, “Look, we realise you could do this, but really?””