HC Deb 12 January 1994 vol 235 cc196-7W
Dr. Liam Fox

To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security, pursuant to the oral answer of 9 December 1993 to the hon. Member for Bristol, East (Ms Corston),Official Report, column 494, if he will now make a statement in regard to the information sought by the hon. Member.

Mr. Burt

The hon. Member for Bristol, East suggested in her intervention on 9 December that at a meeting on 2 December with departmental officials and the head of the government statistical service, she had been told that information on low income statistics could be made available to her which had been previously refused in a series of replies to her questions, on grounds of disproportionate cost or incompatibility with this Department's statistical practice; and she intimated that this information had been wrongly withheld from the House. This is not so.

It continues to be the case that the results in question are either not available at all, could be made available only at disproportionate cost to public funds, or require the use of conventions which DSS statistical advisers consider unsound in the particular context. However, as I have repeatedly said in correspondence with the hon. Member, this Department makes available to bona fide researchers the base data set from which the households below average income statistics are obtained, to enable them to undertake what further analyses they choose under the conventions they prefer. This is entirely compatible with the principles of open government.

At the meeting to which she referred, the hon. Member was not offered replies to questions previously refused on grounds of disproportionate cost, non-availability or unreliability. She was, however, reminded that the base data set could be made available to her research advisers for their own use in the computer readable form of their choice. This repeated an offer first made some months ago, which I understand her researchers have now taken up. This Department's practice continues to be to provide reliable information within normal parliamentary conventions.

I have repeatedly offered the hon. Member for Bristol, East a meeting to discuss the issues about which she is concerned, but she has chosen not to take this up.