§ Mr. SheermanTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the implications for confidentiality and impartiality in a contracted out statutory collection of business statistics service under the Contracting Out (Statistics of Trade) Order 1995.
§ Mr. NelsonThe order referred to exists in draft form only and has not been laid before Parliament. An independent assessment into the attitudes of business to the contracting out of statistical inquiry work was made in October 1993, and the results of the study were placed in the Library. Should an appropriate contracting out order laid under section 77 (2) of the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994 be approved by Parliament, any 577W subsequent market testing or contracting out of statistical inquiry work would take the results of this research into account.