Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) sought to resist the classification decision of the National Accounts Classification Committee in 2004 that the FRC was a public body; if so, whether they supported that resistance; and if so, why.

Throughout the period between 2004 and 2014 the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and the Department for Trade and Industry (and its successors) agreed that the original classification of the FRC as a public body should, if possible, be revised. The Department worked with the FRC to seek its reclassification from the Office for National Statistics on a number of occasions. The justification for this was based on wider Government policy on public bodies and the development of the FRC’s functions.