Dear Lord Puttnam,
Following my appearance before the Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee on 28 January 2020, I am writing to offer my thanks for the invitation to contribute to such an important inquiry. I would also like to reiterate what I said to you in person: I really enjoyed the discussion and the opportunity to present the work of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) to the Committee.
I also wanted to share a recent blog which describes our approach in protecting the role of statistics both during election periods and beyond. The blog summarises some of the interventions we made during the recent 2019 General Election and outlines our role in ensuring that the underlying statistics used in political debate are not being misrepresented – and if they are, that we will seek to clarify how they should be interpreted.
I would be very happy to discuss the content of the blog and the work of the OSR further with the Committee.
Yours sincerely
Ed Humpherson
Director General for Regulation