The census is coming!

A letter from the National Statistician, one Professor Sir Ian Diamond, arrived this lunchtime, with the outside of the envelope dominated by the warning that one is required by law to participate in the census. Not a good start as far as I was concerned, but maybe they know from experience that such warnings need to be loud and clear - rather as they are in letters about speeding fines or on letters about hospital appointments. At least in these last, the warnings are in the letters, rather than on the envelopes!

The letter included our address and postcode, but not our name, so perhaps derived from the postcode address file of reference 2, rather than some administrative record. Did they think of using the name and address files kept by the like of the Amazon Corporation?

Inside we find that digital is best and that the way forward is to type the sixteen character identifier into the website at reference 1 and then to follow the instructions. Which should take around 10 minutes - so a very short form compared with the substantial booklet which used delivered and collected by a census enumerator. For those which this doesn't suit, for one reason or another, there are other arrangements.

One wonders how many servers they have put in - or more probably rented - to cope with a load which will presumably peak in the couple of weeks straddling census day, that is to say Sunday 21st March. But I dare say that 20 or 30 million online forms at 10 minutes each over 10 days is not the more or less impossible technical challenge that it would have been back in 1981, the last time that I had any involvement with a census - as an assistant supervisor of a small team of enumerators.

One supposes that what used to be the large enumerator workforce has been scaled back, and one wonders what efforts are being made to reach people who are not living in straightforward, regular, one family households. People who are apt to be thick on the ground in our larger cities and who used to be hard to find. One wonders how many people who do not have access to a computer or whose English is limited just drop the letter in the bin, without attempting to use the contact numbers provided on the accompanying leaflet.

Both letter and leaflet were very short and I was sorry not to find something more detailed about the conduct of the census at reference 1. Perhaps including something about all the supplementary surveys which will attempt to fill the gap between a long paper census and a short digital one. Perhaps a twenty page pdf geared to the more interested members of the public. Not to mention this former member of the club, with my first boss's boss getting his promotion on the strength of his strong performance on the 1971 census. A promotion which my first boss was rather put out about as he thought the promotion should have been his.

Reference 1: https://census.gov.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.postcodeaddressfile.co.uk/.