5 ms·

UK's 2021 census could be the last, statistics chief reveals

36 points by cmsefton 7y ago

leto_ii 7y ago
It's funny to think that there was a time when the only way to get massive amounts of data about the population was to go door-to-door and ask questions to people. On the other hand relying on indirect data or even surveys can have serious limitations, especially if you base administrative/budgetary decisions on the data collected this way.
- arethuza 7y ago
  7% of households in the UK still don't have internet access: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/householdcharacteristics/homeinternetandsocialmediausage/bulletins/internetaccesshouseholdsandindividuals/2019 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/househol...
  - vidanay 7y ago
    After the census, it will be 6.732%
guiriduro 7y ago
But how will we track the evolution of the jedi religion in the UK without it?
yardie 7y ago
The census is used as the baseline for a lot of statistical models. It’s not cheap but it is extremely accurate. So if your model starts with garbage data you get garbagr results. Hell, even the guy in charge of it doesn’t appear convinced. Like we’re going to “magic science” our way out of having to do it.
curiousgal 7y ago
Talk about about being cheap! 900M is like 90M per year, that's a cheap price for understanding the structure and characteristics of a population. You can never repliacte a census using random surveys. It's the holy Grail of data. Data from U.S. census from centuries ago is still being used to teach econometrics. But hey, if they were stupid enough to leave the EU then they're capable of doing anything.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  > But hey, if they were stupid enough to leave the EU than they're capable of doing anything. This is quite offensive. Please don't tar the entire country with the same brush. This was - and still is - a highly controversial & divisive subject. It was only voted in by 51.89% vs 48.11% of the population ...at the time - more recent polling suggests it has flipped (1) 1 - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-second-referendum-latest-poll-remain-ten-points-leave-bmg-a8114406.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-second...
  - dan1234 7y ago
    > It was only voted in by 51.89% vs 48.11% of the population It was voted for by 51.89% of the people who voted, which was 72.2% of the electorate. It was only voted for by 37.4% of the electorate (46.5m) and only 26.2% of the overall population (66.4m).
    - busterarm 7y ago
      People cast their vote by not voting too, you know. If you cast the "I don't give a shit" vote, I'm not going to take you seriously if you cry about the outcome afterwards.
      - bloak 7y ago
        People also cast their vote by posting an invalid ballot paper, such as one with "Reform the voting system!" or "This is a stupid question!" written on it. Unfortunately it's quite hard to find out how many people do that. They're probably trying to discourage people from protesting in that way. The people who win the election like to pretend they have a mandate.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Those numbers are perfectly typical for a big vote in a western country. The US routinely decides presidential elections with less margin, less electorate turnout and a smaller portion of the population being eligible to vote.[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
s9w 7y ago
It's hard to comprehend how these things could possibly cost as much as they do. A billion pounds to send some letters? Huh
- akmarinov 7y ago
  How do other countries do it? I'm fairly sure we're having one next year over here in Eastern Europe and no way is our government spending that much on a census, we got some jet fighters for about that much...
  - jotm 7y ago
    Hmm, 906 million for 66 million people = 13.7 pounds/capita. Romania does it for 1/3 of that, 84 million Euro for 20 million people = 4.2 Euro/capita. There's a breakdown of how it's done and the spending, too: https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/costuri-uriase-recensamant-bani-2875475 https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/costuri-uriase-recensamant-b... (translate with whatever, Google and Bing are useless for me) OK, so wages are a factor, but the UK's cost seems like it should be lower.
- ben_w 7y ago
  £1bn total is about £15/person. Delivery has to be guaranteed because the letters are a legal requirement. If each delivery covers two people, but sending out and returning are both paid for by the government, and if it counts as a 100-250g large letter 2nd class, that’s already £2.52/person without the cost of printing, processing, or storage.
  - estel 7y ago
    If everyone answered their one letter I'm sure the census would be a lot cheaper, but I think most of the real cost comes from employing thousands of people who go around the country knocking on the doors of those who haven't responded yet.
thombat 7y ago
So the 2021 census is projected to cost twice as much as the 2011 one did, but unfortunately the cause of this isn't explored in the article. However it does note that there's "a drive to get most people to complete next year's census online". Could it be the the UK govt has yet again had an IT project spiral into runaway costs?
- okasaki 7y ago
  The population is higher, and the pound is worth less.
- estel 7y ago
  They ran a trial for the online census at the end of last year, and it looks in pretty sensible shape. I think it's being delivered internally.
botwriter 7y ago
the cynic in me thinks the uncurrent is racial repopuation. This census is going to be a shit show and everyone knows its racial tensions are going to be at an all time high when the data shows the great replacement is actually happening (like it or not it is in the UK). 2021 is going to be a fascinating time in the UK when this data comes out.
krapp 7y ago
Why do we even need to take a census in the age of omnipresent state surveillance? Our governments already know exactly where we are and what we're doing practically at all times, tracking our web activity, listening in through our phones and devices, reading our mail, tapping into the data servers of the few tech companies that won't happily hand over our private data directly to governments with a smile. And in a few years the mass deployment of facial recognition software and self-driving cars will allow governments to correlate race and gender to our travel and purchase habits down to the last second and foot. An actual census seems like a quaint atavism. The UK can just ask the NSA to count its citizens and provide whatever demographic data is required, and the US can ask the same of the UK. Problem solved.
- akmarinov 7y ago
  Publicly admitting that is probably something that they don't want to do. On the other hand, stopping a census for dumb reasons is one way to do it without publicly admitting they already have the data.
  - krapp 7y ago
    They don't need to publicly admit anything, thanks to Wikileaks and Snowden, it's a matter of public record. Since we don't have any choice about whether or not to participate in the panopticon, and it's clear no one is going to do anything to stop it, then it should at least serve some public good. Offer a public API and let Western countries build services directly on top of it.
- specialist 7y ago
  Every time I make this painfully obvious point, I also get downvoted. I'd really like any of the downvoters to explain their objections. How can any one working in tech or policy deny the existence of ubiquitous demographic databases? How is this even controversial? Source: Worked very hard for a decade to protect both patient and voter privacy.
rwmj 7y ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10584385 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10584385 "National census in 2011 could be last of its kind" https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thelastcensus https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thelastcensus "the enduring problems with the 2001 count may mean that after 200 years it could be the last one in its present form. It may have demonstrated that measuring population in our more mobile society is just too difficult."
londons_explore 7y ago
> said an estimated £906m would be spent I wonder how exactly it costs this much? What is the money spent on? Lets imagine the 'MVP' census. A printed 10 page document (£0.45), mailed to each household (£0.61), in an envelope (£0.02), times 27.6 million houses. Return mailing costs another £0.61+0.02. Scan every sheet. OCR it (free). Hand-enter 1% of responses where OCR errors are excessive. 276,000 documents hand entered at 5 minutes per document, £10/hr. £0.0083/household. Total costs: £47M Cost of running a few trial runs of one 10,000 house town or city to perfect the process: £100k Pay for a year 1 statistician to make graphs, one social scientist to design questions, one manager for the team of printing/scanning/hand-entering people, one IT person to keep/archive the data and get it on the web, and a head of department. Also a little office. Total fixed costs £800k. The whole thing can seemingly be done for 5% of the quoted cost. And that excludes any potential efficiencies gained by having an app to collect responses, or bulk discounts from postage companies. Also, while a redacted version of the full dataset is published, I would expect the government department to also offer commercial statistics services on the non-redacted dataset where such analysis doesn't impact customer privacy. That should earn them tens of millions at least.
- ben_w 7y ago
  61p is second class standard letter weighing up to 100g without any extra guarantees of delivery. As it’s a legal requirement to do the census, I’d use the price estimate for the signed deliveries; as it’s meant to cover a household and is quite long, I’d estimate the 100-250g/large letter price band; together, that’s £2.52 each way.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  These are more or less the absolute minimum cost for doing it - and when has anything beyond an MVP cost the absolute minimum? Any real-world project, especially at that scale has much more external costs. There is also enforcement, publicising, security handling, approvals, way more than 1 person to come up with the questions (1 random employee designing the census would be such a waste if you get an average social scientist, that it's ridiculous to propose), compliance, double-checking, etc. etc. Going from 47m to 906m - when you account for the costs that exist in the real world for something as big and comprehensive like this - is actually fairly reasonable.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
I wonder if they'll think, well, other countries manage without, why do we need it? But the UK doesn't necessarily have what those countries do. Sweden doesn't need a census because it forces everyone to register their address and family relationships with the central government within 7 days of those changing. The UK by contrast has many disparate single-purpose databases which do not form a coherent whole.
biscotti 7y ago
Datashine is probably the best representation of the previous (2011) UK census data: https://datashine.org.uk https://datashine.org.uk I’m somewhat amused sibling comments have been downvoted for pointing out the demographic shift these censuses illustrate, reason enough imo to think the decision to end them could be more political than from a concern for what they might cost. Peter Thiel after all predicts the future for European countries is to end up as either surveillance or Islamic states, something I’m guessing the natives would neither take kindly to nor be too comfortable knowing the likely consequence of this for their offspring. This is the elephant in the room & the deciding factor that led to the Brexit vote, & you can pick any of Angela Merkels recklessness, Daves dodgy timing or the Saudi / Turkish / UAE funding of mosques that encourage next to no mixing or liberalisation of this demographic to thank for that.
rkwasny 7y ago
Isn't it surprising that the government cannot send a text message to whole population: Please fill in this online census questionnaire https://[unique_link_here] https://[unique_link_here] Some ads/incentives here and there to remind people to fill it and one should have 90%+ completion rate.
specialist 7y ago
What's the ideal implementation of a modern census? We now have multiple demographic databases accounting for all peoples, both living and dead, updated in near real time. Facebook & Google, telcos, credit rating agencies, data aggregators, NSA, law enforcement, credit card companies, voter registrations, medical records, etc. Instead of sending people around with clipboards and surveys, why don't we just run some queries on the databases we already have?

36 points by cmsefton 7y ago

It's funny to think that there was a time when the only way to get massive amounts of data about the population was to go door-to-door and ask questions to people. On the other hand relying on indirect data or even surveys can have serious limitations, especially if you base administrative/budgetary decisions on the data collected this way.

arethuza 7y ago
7% of households in the UK still don't have internet access: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/householdcharacteristics/homeinternetandsocialmediausage/bulletins/internetaccesshouseholdsandindividuals/2019 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/househol...
- vidanay 7y ago
  After the census, it will be 6.732%

guiriduro 7y ago

But how will we track the evolution of the jedi religion in the UK without it?

yardie 7y ago

The census is used as the baseline for a lot of statistical models. It’s not cheap but it is extremely accurate. So if your model starts with garbage data you get garbagr results. Hell, even the guy in charge of it doesn’t appear convinced. Like we’re going to “magic science” our way out of having to do it.

curiousgal 7y ago

Talk about about being cheap! 900M is like 90M per year, that's a cheap price for understanding the structure and characteristics of a population. You can never repliacte a census using random surveys. It's the holy Grail of data. Data from U.S. census from centuries ago is still being used to teach econometrics. But hey, if they were stupid enough to leave the EU then they're capable of doing anything.

mattlondon 7y ago
> But hey, if they were stupid enough to leave the EU than they're capable of doing anything. This is quite offensive. Please don't tar the entire country with the same brush. This was - and still is - a highly controversial & divisive subject. It was only voted in by 51.89% vs 48.11% of the population ...at the time - more recent polling suggests it has flipped (1) 1 - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-second-referendum-latest-poll-remain-ten-points-leave-bmg-a8114406.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-second...
- dan1234 7y ago
  > It was only voted in by 51.89% vs 48.11% of the population It was voted for by 51.89% of the people who voted, which was 72.2% of the electorate. It was only voted for by 37.4% of the electorate (46.5m) and only 26.2% of the overall population (66.4m).
  - busterarm 7y ago
    People cast their vote by not voting too, you know. If you cast the "I don't give a shit" vote, I'm not going to take you seriously if you cry about the outcome afterwards.
    - bloak 7y ago
      People also cast their vote by posting an invalid ballot paper, such as one with "Reform the voting system!" or "This is a stupid question!" written on it. Unfortunately it's quite hard to find out how many people do that. They're probably trying to discourage people from protesting in that way. The people who win the election like to pretend they have a mandate.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Those numbers are perfectly typical for a big vote in a western country. The US routinely decides presidential elections with less margin, less electorate turnout and a smaller portion of the population being eligible to vote.[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

s9w 7y ago

It's hard to comprehend how these things could possibly cost as much as they do. A billion pounds to send some letters? Huh

akmarinov 7y ago
How do other countries do it? I'm fairly sure we're having one next year over here in Eastern Europe and no way is our government spending that much on a census, we got some jet fighters for about that much...
- jotm 7y ago
  Hmm, 906 million for 66 million people = 13.7 pounds/capita. Romania does it for 1/3 of that, 84 million Euro for 20 million people = 4.2 Euro/capita. There's a breakdown of how it's done and the spending, too: https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/costuri-uriase-recensamant-bani-2875475 https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/costuri-uriase-recensamant-b... (translate with whatever, Google and Bing are useless for me) OK, so wages are a factor, but the UK's cost seems like it should be lower.
ben_w 7y ago
£1bn total is about £15/person. Delivery has to be guaranteed because the letters are a legal requirement. If each delivery covers two people, but sending out and returning are both paid for by the government, and if it counts as a 100-250g large letter 2nd class, that’s already £2.52/person without the cost of printing, processing, or storage.
- estel 7y ago
  If everyone answered their one letter I'm sure the census would be a lot cheaper, but I think most of the real cost comes from employing thousands of people who go around the country knocking on the doors of those who haven't responded yet.

thombat 7y ago

So the 2021 census is projected to cost twice as much as the 2011 one did, but unfortunately the cause of this isn't explored in the article. However it does note that there's "a drive to get most people to complete next year's census online". Could it be the the UK govt has yet again had an IT project spiral into runaway costs?

okasaki 7y ago
The population is higher, and the pound is worth less.
estel 7y ago
They ran a trial for the online census at the end of last year, and it looks in pretty sensible shape. I think it's being delivered internally.

botwriter 7y ago

the cynic in me thinks the uncurrent is racial repopuation. This census is going to be a shit show and everyone knows its racial tensions are going to be at an all time high when the data shows the great replacement is actually happening (like it or not it is in the UK). 2021 is going to be a fascinating time in the UK when this data comes out.

krapp 7y ago

Why do we even need to take a census in the age of omnipresent state surveillance? Our governments already know exactly where we are and what we're doing practically at all times, tracking our web activity, listening in through our phones and devices, reading our mail, tapping into the data servers of the few tech companies that won't happily hand over our private data directly to governments with a smile. And in a few years the mass deployment of facial recognition software and self-driving cars will allow governments to correlate race and gender to our travel and purchase habits down to the last second and foot. An actual census seems like a quaint atavism. The UK can just ask the NSA to count its citizens and provide whatever demographic data is required, and the US can ask the same of the UK. Problem solved.

akmarinov 7y ago
Publicly admitting that is probably something that they don't want to do. On the other hand, stopping a census for dumb reasons is one way to do it without publicly admitting they already have the data.
- krapp 7y ago
  They don't need to publicly admit anything, thanks to Wikileaks and Snowden, it's a matter of public record. Since we don't have any choice about whether or not to participate in the panopticon, and it's clear no one is going to do anything to stop it, then it should at least serve some public good. Offer a public API and let Western countries build services directly on top of it.
specialist 7y ago
Every time I make this painfully obvious point, I also get downvoted. I'd really like any of the downvoters to explain their objections. How can any one working in tech or policy deny the existence of ubiquitous demographic databases? How is this even controversial? Source: Worked very hard for a decade to protect both patient and voter privacy.

rwmj 7y ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10584385 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10584385 "National census in 2011 could be last of its kind" https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thelastcensus https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thelastcensus "the enduring problems with the 2001 count may mean that after 200 years it could be the last one in its present form. It may have demonstrated that measuring population in our more mobile society is just too difficult."

londons_explore 7y ago

> said an estimated £906m would be spent I wonder how exactly it costs this much? What is the money spent on? Lets imagine the 'MVP' census. A printed 10 page document (£0.45), mailed to each household (£0.61), in an envelope (£0.02), times 27.6 million houses. Return mailing costs another £0.61+0.02. Scan every sheet. OCR it (free). Hand-enter 1% of responses where OCR errors are excessive. 276,000 documents hand entered at 5 minutes per document, £10/hr. £0.0083/household. Total costs: £47M Cost of running a few trial runs of one 10,000 house town or city to perfect the process: £100k Pay for a year 1 statistician to make graphs, one social scientist to design questions, one manager for the team of printing/scanning/hand-entering people, one IT person to keep/archive the data and get it on the web, and a head of department. Also a little office. Total fixed costs £800k. The whole thing can seemingly be done for 5% of the quoted cost. And that excludes any potential efficiencies gained by having an app to collect responses, or bulk discounts from postage companies. Also, while a redacted version of the full dataset is published, I would expect the government department to also offer commercial statistics services on the non-redacted dataset where such analysis doesn't impact customer privacy. That should earn them tens of millions at least.

ben_w 7y ago
61p is second class standard letter weighing up to 100g without any extra guarantees of delivery. As it’s a legal requirement to do the census, I’d use the price estimate for the signed deliveries; as it’s meant to cover a household and is quite long, I’d estimate the 100-250g/large letter price band; together, that’s £2.52 each way.
Tenoke 7y ago
These are more or less the absolute minimum cost for doing it - and when has anything beyond an MVP cost the absolute minimum? Any real-world project, especially at that scale has much more external costs. There is also enforcement, publicising, security handling, approvals, way more than 1 person to come up with the questions (1 random employee designing the census would be such a waste if you get an average social scientist, that it's ridiculous to propose), compliance, double-checking, etc. etc. Going from 47m to 906m - when you account for the costs that exist in the real world for something as big and comprehensive like this - is actually fairly reasonable.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

I wonder if they'll think, well, other countries manage without, why do we need it? But the UK doesn't necessarily have what those countries do. Sweden doesn't need a census because it forces everyone to register their address and family relationships with the central government within 7 days of those changing. The UK by contrast has many disparate single-purpose databases which do not form a coherent whole.

biscotti 7y ago

Datashine is probably the best representation of the previous (2011) UK census data: https://datashine.org.uk https://datashine.org.uk I’m somewhat amused sibling comments have been downvoted for pointing out the demographic shift these censuses illustrate, reason enough imo to think the decision to end them could be more political than from a concern for what they might cost. Peter Thiel after all predicts the future for European countries is to end up as either surveillance or Islamic states, something I’m guessing the natives would neither take kindly to nor be too comfortable knowing the likely consequence of this for their offspring. This is the elephant in the room & the deciding factor that led to the Brexit vote, & you can pick any of Angela Merkels recklessness, Daves dodgy timing or the Saudi / Turkish / UAE funding of mosques that encourage next to no mixing or liberalisation of this demographic to thank for that.

rkwasny 7y ago

Isn't it surprising that the government cannot send a text message to whole population: Please fill in this online census questionnaire https://[unique_link_here] https://[unique_link_here] Some ads/incentives here and there to remind people to fill it and one should have 90%+ completion rate.

specialist 7y ago

What's the ideal implementation of a modern census? We now have multiple demographic databases accounting for all peoples, both living and dead, updated in near real time. Facebook & Google, telcos, credit rating agencies, data aggregators, NSA, law enforcement, credit card companies, voter registrations, medical records, etc. Instead of sending people around with clipboards and surveys, why don't we just run some queries on the databases we already have?