Let us start with a quiz question. A British tradition dating back more than two centuries faces abolition, even though it is both hugely popular and highly valuable to policymakers and researchers. Social scientists and historians are in outcry, while the wider public remains in the dark. What is it?
Try: the census. Ever since 1801, a register of the population has been taken every 10 years – the only interruption being in 1941 – yet we may have conducted our last. The Office for National Statistics last month ended its public consultation on the future of the census in England and Wales. A gauge of its attitude can be taken from the proposal document, which states: “We have reached a point where a serious question can be asked about the role the census plays in our statistical system.” If it goes, the censuses for Scotland and Northern Ireland will almost certainly follow.
The ONS believes that a once-a-decade snapshot of the population could be replaced by a patchwork quilt of other statistics that are already collected, in a new system providing more frequent updates. Yet, as academics and researchers have pointed out, no scheme has been presented for how all the thousands of bits of data collected by other state agencies will be put together when harmonisation is patchy and some of the data is of questionable quality. The migration figures are a notorious example, underestimating the UK population during the 2000s by nearly half a million – an undercount revealed in the 2011 census.
The risk is that officials will take something that isn’t broke and needs no fixing, and spend many millions coming up with a shoddy substitute. Money is especially relevant here, as the initial proposal to scrap the census came from the axe-wielders of David Cameron’s regime. Yet the census remains hugely popular. Where “overseers of the poor” once went door to door collecting information from slum-dwellers, today a twentysomething in a shared house can do the entire thing over the internet. Crucially, it works: the 2021 census had a 97% response rate.
All of us ticking boxes together provides a vital resource for policymakers and social scientists. Then, a century after each census, it is fully opened up to the public, becoming a treasure trove for future historians and family genealogists. If history is a dialogue between past and present, without this record we would only talk to the wealthy, powerful and criminal (who land up in court documents). As Simon Szreter, a professor of history at Cambridge, has written: “For many of the urban poor … the census of 1841 [which began noting names, ages and other details] was the first time their identities – their existence – had become a matter of official record … the first time they became known to history and so today to their posterity.”
Besides this, the census is valuable testimony of the questions that officials think are worth asking, and the answers the public give. Ethnicity was not mentioned on the form until 1991, while sexual orientation only became a query in 2021. In 1911, as women fought for the vote, many gave their occupation as “suffragette”. In the 2001 census, 390,000 residents of England and Wales chose “Jedi” as their religion. The trend’s hotspot was, naturally, Brighton and Hove. Such gems tell us more than who lives in our nations; they reveal something of our national life. To scrap the survey that collects them would be a terrible mistake.
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