§ Mr. Holtasked the President of the Board of Trade whether he will amend the published statistics in such a way as to provide a clear indication of the extent to which changes in indices are affected by the number of firms involved.
§ Mr. ErrollNo. The primary purposes of indices of production is to measure changes in the national totals. The number of returns collected for this purpose is very large and changes only slowly, allowances being made each month for these few which are received too late for inclusion in the index calculation. Since the returns are often collected on a sample basis or from individual factories an analysis according to the number of firms concerned is impracticable.