§ Mr. David Steelasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer why there has been a delay of between nine and 12 months in making full trade statistics available for the period March to August 1981; whether he will ensure that extra resources are used to speed up their production; and if he will make a statement.
§ Sir Geoffrey HoweAt the end of the industrial dispute in the Civil Service, Customs and Excise were faced with a backlog of processing for the overseas trade statistics equivalent to six months' work. A number of options for the resumption of processing were considered. Taking into account the requirements of Government and industrial users, the computer resources available and certain technical considerations in Customs and Excise where a new method of processing the statistics is to be introduced from the beginning of 1982, it was decided that the balance of advantage lay in resuming current processing first.
The possibility of speeding up production by doing some of this work on other Government or private sector computers was considered but there are serious technical difficulties preventing this. The processing system is complex and even if a suitable installation could be made available, a substantial number of experienced staff would be required to input, check and correct the data. In addition, in the case of non-official resources there is the question of preserving the confidentiality of the data.
The backlog of statistics for the period March to August 1981 will be processed as soon as resources allow and it is expected that recovery will be completed by July of next year. Import figures for the backlog will be completed in full detail but in order to reduce the workload to manageable proportions it is necessary to produce estimates for exports based on a 10 per cent. sample. On this basis estimates will be available of exports in total and for broad commodity and area groups but the full detail at commodity heading/country level will not be available.