Speeches by Carling.

“The hon. Lady makes her point well, and we have already heard from the Minister about the rationale behind those clauses. There are real issues with putting such measures through in secondary legislation, because this House should have more ability to scrutinise them. We know there is a consultation at the moment, and …”

“Do you think it is likely to lead to a better outcome if we do it that way, rather than being a bit more transparent and open about the way things may have moved since that time? Nick Thomas-Symonds: There are two things there. First, it is very important that I continue to update Parliament and am held to account, as …”

“Good morning, Minister. The European Commission publishes the EU’s opening position for negotiations with partners like the UK—it has done so on youth mobility, for example. Are the Government intending to do anything similar? Nick Thomas-Symonds: I do not think the EU has published a final negotiating position yet. Va…”

“Not to labour this point but just to come in on it specifically, would you agree, Minister, that when we are looking at this as a whole, to add in a process to convert existing hereditary peers into life peers almost kicks the can down the road and extends the issue further than necessary? Is there also a point that to…”

“That is a fair point. You have talked about how you are weighting afterwards. It does surprise me a little that, even before this became an issue, there was not more discussion of how you weighted for different demographic groups, because there are different ways of classifying people into demographic groups. You can a…”

“In which case, as a follow-up question, are we in line with what a lot of other countries do?”

“Thank you for coming in today. It has been a really helpful discussion. We have talked a few times about end-users of the data, their reasons for using it and the way that they are working. What consultations do you have with your data’s end-users when you are making changes to methodology? Particularly with the moveme…”

“That is helpful. Continuing on the theme of international collaboration, the decline in our response rate has been much worse than equivalent surveys in other countries. Do we have much indication as to why that is?”

“That is really helpful and covers a question that I was going to ask about lessons learned. Even then, when it was raised in October, it says in the board minutes that “members had not been made aware of the extent to which the LFS response had fallen recently”.”

“Good morning, Sir Ian. There are no issues with the labour force survey discussed in the minutes of the meetings at the UK Statistics Authority throughout 2023, up until the publication was suspended in October, and we just heard a bit about that. Could you just tell us a bit more about why this would not have been esc…”

“Just to touch on a couple of other things that Dr Sandher was speaking about, you said that, at the moment, you sample and then weight by age and sex. Presumably, you are limited from stratifying the sample in advance because you do not have enough data on the people living there until you have surveyed them. Is that a…”

“I welcome the Government’s announcements today, in particular on the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are an economic powerhouse for our country. What we often find is that spin-out businesses from Cambridge look to move to Peterborough as they grow, because of our expertise in advanced…”

“Are there particular demographic patterns in the people who manage to do this job and is that changing very much over time?”

“On the staffing of polling stations and other polling-related staff, you mentioned that there have been a number of issues in terms of both recruitment and retention. I wonder if you could go into a bit more detail about that and tell us whether you think it will get worse or better as time goes on.”

“That makes a lot of sense. One of the other things in my mind is the way we are seeking people to do these pieces of work and whether the advertising mechanisms are appropriate. I often see adverts on social media, but if it is primarily an older demographic, perhaps that is not the most effective way of doing it. Do y…”

“Sure. It is worth highlighting that election addresses are an issue only for general elections, so they might come up less often in your constant feedback processes. Finally, you mentioned timelines by which you are expected to deliver the election addresses. Can you let me know what those are?”

“Okay, that is interesting, and something we can certainly take away and look at. Have you done any work on how you can learn from that experience about where the issues were? Is there any guidance you are looking at producing for agents in that case, or anything else along those lines?”

“When an election address is sent to you by a candidate, you rely on the candidate to tell you where it needs to go.”

“That is right, yes.”

“Absolutely, and absolute credit to you for the work that was done; I know you are under a very tight timescale. Just to bring up another similar issue, there were some boundary issues. A number of colleagues raised that the wrong freepost was being delivered in the wrong areas. Could you tell us a little more about whe…”