Statistician who went to UK says he stayed his own man

Len Cook

Former New Zealand public servant Len Cook, who recently styled himself as "Britain's most abused civil servant", is returning home in November.

And once home, Mr Cook, who spent more than eight years in charge of Statistics New Zealand before taking charge of the UK Office for National Statistics, plans to go fishing.

"I do not want another chief executive's position," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London.

After 5 1/2 years as National Statistician he spent a lot of his last few days in the job declaring that he was his own man.

Mr Cook, who the newspaper said had at times been accused of interpreting statistics in ways favourable to the British Government, insisted that he had been unbiased and independent.

"I have a high degree of statutory independence and I haven't acted any different than I did in New Zealand," he said.

"I have never sent any press releases to anyone for approval and I have never asked anyone about what we should do."

At one stage Mr Cook was closely questioned by the Commons Treasury Select Committee over what some MPs claimed was a 43 billion accounting failure.

He said he hoped his successor, Karen Dunnell, would enjoy dealing with the "boisterous" British press.

Despite the maulings he suffered, there was "nothing I would have rather done in the last 5 1/2 years. I always like to hit the bastards back".

Mr Cook's work also covered the UK database of births, deaths and marriages, and his office signed a contract to digitise 250 million births, deaths and marriage paper records.

He said 80,000 microfilm archives of paper records would be scanned in the UK, the digital images encrypted and sent electronically to India, where key information would be captured to produce an electronic index to all the records.

Mr Cook rejected concerns over the potential for identity theft, and said the work would cost substantially more if done entirely in the UK.

Mr Cook also served as the "Registrar General of England and Wales" and in that role decided to remove the terms "spinsters" and "bachelors" in reforms to marriage laws to coincide with the introduction of gay weddings.

The terms spinster and bachelor will now disappear from official use in England and Wales from December 5.

- NZPA