The views of the statistical council

Abstract

I think I can assume that anyone attending this symposium is both interested in, and relatively well informed about, the institutional arrangements for the collection and publication of official statistics. I will presume that the broad outline of the Government Paper "A New Institutional Structure for the Central Statistics Office", which contains the "Report and Recommendations of the Statistical Council" as an Appendix, is already familiar to the attendance. So, in the next section I will only briefly summarise the main findings of the Council's report and the corresponding contents of the Government Paper. However, there are two other topics that I do want to find time for. The first relates to the general approach adopted by the Council in preparing its report. The second concerns the thinking behind some of the points in the Council's report, especially in regard to recommendations of the Council that did not find their way into the Government Paper proper or that are less emphasised in that Paper.