Great Britain is conducting its national census this month, which save for the war year of 1941, the government has done every decade since 1801. According to an article by Jon Henley in the Guardian, the count costs £482 million, and because it “is expensive, inaccurate and inefficient,” it is likely to be the last one the UK takes.
It is, of course, astonishing that Britain might get rid of something as seemingly fundamental as a national census–it seems to me that any government activity that was provoked by the arguments of Thomas Malthus would be something you’d hang onto, just for the prestige–but here’s what’s more astonishing: the UK’s census form is a 32 page booklet! Each person is required answer (or have answered for him) four pages of questions. “Among other things, it wants to know what type of central heating we have, how many bedrooms we have got, who is staying over on the night of 27 March (plus their age, sex and where they usually live), how well we speak English, and what our employer’s address is.” Says Alex Deane, the former director of the pro-privacy organization Big Brother Watch, says “No other free country requires this degree of detail. It’s a real intrusion of the state where it doesn’t belong. There is a need for a simple headcount, yes, of course. But this goes way beyond that.” Deane says he will refuse to fill out the form, a principled act of civil disobedience which will probably not cost him, since it is estimated that three million people don’t fill out the form, and about a hundred prosecutions for non-cooperation (failure is punishable by a £1000 fine.)
Apart from the intrusiveness, the census does not seem to be as accurate as it ought to be. Writes Henley, “Last time around, in 2001, the census managed to miss 900,000 men under 40. . . .No one seems to quite know how this happened.” And even though the government and the Church of England seem all intertwined (a relationship as anachronistic as a doublet), the government really shouldn’t be asking people about their religious beliefs, especially if they are going to get ridiculous answers. In 2001, after a jokey internet campaign, 390,000 British residents said they were Jedi knights, which would have made Jedi Britain’s fourth-largest religion. Meanwhile, groups like Sikhs and Jews believe they are systematically under-counted, and other groups think religiosity in general is greatly over-measured.
Which has led Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister (that’s the no-frills title of his job, unhelpfully), is looking for “ways of doing this which will provide better, quicker information, more frequently and cheaper”. The census, he complains, is “out of date almost before it’s done”; data held by the likes of the NHS, councils, Royal Mail, the electoral register, tax returns and even credit card firms and phone companies can do the job. David Voas of the University of Manchester thinks this would be short-sighted. For all its problems, the census “is a single, highly controllable exercise. If you try to pull that same information from all the other data sets out there – GPs, NI, credit card records, commercial databases, local authorities – there’s going to be an awful lot of duplication, an awful lot of incompleteness. How do you marry these data sets? How can you be sure different records refer to the same people? It’s very hard to believe that either accuracy or security will be anything like as good. And even if you concede that on a national level you may arrive at information that’s more or less adequate – on ethnicity for example – at a local level it will be an absolute, unmitigated disaster.”
Here’s one more oddity: Britain may ask more questions than the US, but one question they don’t ask is about the respondent’s income. Too sensitive a question, apparently.