Govt pretends to axe census to save money
The Telegraph reports today:
Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Census, which takes place every 10 years, was an expensive and inaccurate way of measuring the number of people in Britain.
Instead, the Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies.
Mr Maude was looking to save the £482 million cost apparently.
But is the idea actually feasible or just an attempt to gain some favourable headlines?
The FT’s Westminster blog points out:
However, he admitted that next year’s census would still have to go ahead. He vowed instead to cancel the next official headcount – which will not occur until 2021.
To get to that point the Tories (or coalition) have to win the 2015 election and then the 2020 election. And still be in a cost-cutting mood. That’s a whole pyramid of ifs.
In other words, it’s not going to happen.
Clearly it’s an attempt to say: ‘look, things are so bad that we even have to axe the census!‘.
There’s a big downside: the public will associate the Tories will slashing everything. That alone will come with a political cost. But if the economy doesn’t recover quickly enough then they’ll also blame the Tories for the slump.
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Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
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If they obscure the facts via taking control of measuring and they also abandon targets it will be harder to proove that they are a disaster, or so the theory must run.
Cancelling the 2021 census does not require being in power in 2021. All they need to do is pass the Census (Abolition) Act during this parliament. This doesn’t stop a later government from reinstating it, but to suggest they would actually have to be in power at that time in order to do anything at all about it is just silly.
Why not just replace the Office for National Statistics with a bunch of headbaging market ideologues?
This is fucking idiotic, gesture politics at its worst or a cynical ploy to prevent proper data gathering that may play against tory doctrine.
Maude says that he will use credit rating data instead. Huh? And is he expecting them to give him the data for free? Perhaps someone should explain to Maude that the civil service make predictions based upon the census and the accuracy of the census determines the accuracy of those forecasts.
The data that the credit rating agencies have is ours. Literally, the EU data protection laws say that it is. Surely we have the choice whether our data is shared with a nasty right wing government?
“To get to that point the Tories (or coalition) have to win the 2015 election and then the 2020 election.”
Nonsense. If they’d won the 2015 election but lost the 2020, Labour wouldn’t have enough time to organise a 2021 census. And given that the series of ten-yearly censuses would thus have been disrupted, there might be a tendency to fall in with the Tories’ plan. After all, Germany hasn’t had a full national census since 1987, and the Social Democrats didn’t reintroduce one.
@1 is correct
This is a far more worrying story than that, Sunny. The Tories are trying to compromise the single best source of data that any researcher (Government or independent) can have to measure the real effects of policy on society.
No matter what their stated reason, any Government that deliberately tries to compromise data on their own effectiveness must be regarded with the utmost suspicion. Especially on this scale.
This is really, really bad news. No Government for 200 years has done this, Sunny, no matter what financial constraints they have or whatever policies they are looking to enact.
How will be possible to compile statistics on race, ethnicity and religious affiliation from credit rating data and the like?
Or maybe that’s the point. We’re not supposed to know.
Without census takers what am I going to have with my fava beans and a nice chianti?
In the run-up to the last census, the question of whether it was still a sensible / cost-effective approach to getting data that people need was raised, including the possibility of axing the once-every-ten-years model. And that wasn’t a novel idea that time round either nor was it one that came from Conservative politicians.
So I’m not sure why it being raised this time is seen by you Sunny as being spin about cuts, rather than just a continuation of the regular debate about whether or not the census model is still the right one? (A similar point of course applies to several of the comment above too.)
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- Stopping the Census would be an ideological choice that damages social policy… « My Political Ramblings
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