Over at the Straight Statistics blog, Nigel Hawkes reports that All-Party Parliamentary Group on Straight Statistics Chair, Lord Lipsey, has given his backing to calls to reform the way official statistics are handled.

Not long after the election, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar, wrote to David Cameron pressing him on three changes, which it was claimed, would boost public confidence in official statistics.

Lord Lipsey has now also written to the PM urging the implementation of Sir Michael’s recommendations.

While having the heads of statistics in government departments reporting to the national statistician, or introducing greater consultation of spending on statistics may not be changes that set the pulse racing, the other plea from Sir Michael seems like something like something transparency campaigners should get behind.

He called for the amount of time ministers get to look at figures before they are published to be reduced from 24 hours to three hours.

In addition, politicians would have to refrain from making comment on the statistics for an hour after publication.

From the point of view of transparency in official figures it seems hard to argue against this particular plea. Giving members of the Government the opportunity to master the numbers before they were presented to the public, picking out any silver linings to bad news stories seems like an unhealthy state of affairs.

Given Full Fact’s belief in the need for greater transparency in the political debate, we hope that such recommendations will be looked at closely.