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Census (England and Wales) Order 2009

I thank the Minister for that thorough presentation of the detail of the order before us. I can keep my remarks brief in response as many of the issues were covered this week, as I am sure the Minister is aware, in the debate on this issue that took place in the First Delegated Legislation Committee in another place. That debate raised a number of the issues which we would otherwise have wanted to explore today, but I do not wish to detain the Grand Committee too much. A number of questions were asked by my honourable friend Nick Hurd in the First Delegated Legislation Committee, but I wish to take this last opportunity to scrutinise the order and to elicit responses from the Minister, if possible, to his fair and reasonable questions. I should like to go over again the questions on which we seek clarification. The first question relates to costs, to which the Minister has just referred. The costs of the census in 2001 were £214 million; it is projected that the costs will rise to £482 million in 2011. Clearly this increase in costs represents a significant increase over the rate of inflation. As not many more homes will be covered, and given that the public finances are in a state of distress, would it not be appropriate to revisit that figure to see whether it can be reduced? However, before pursuing that line, can the Minister respond to the specific question of whether the increase in costs can be explained? The second question asked by my honourable friend Nick Hurd in the Committee in another place concerned the assumptions used in awarding the contract to the American company Lockheed Martin. What assumptions were made about the response rate for the 2011 census? Some data show that the census response rate in 1991 was 96 per cent and that in 2001 it had fallen to 93.9 per cent. An essential critique of the order before us is that, by lengthening the form and increasing the number of questions and their potential complexity, the level of response might be lower, and presumably when the contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin an assumption was made. Could that assumption be put on record? During the previous census there were seven times more calls than expected to the helpline which had been set up to assist people in completing the form—2.6 million in total. Given that the new census form is longer and more complex, what assumption has been made about the number of calls that might be made to the call centre, and what steps are to be taken to ensure that the extraordinary delays which people experienced previously are not experienced this time round? This will be effectively the first census carried out during the broadband era, if one might loosely describe it as such, and a lot of people will use computers to submit their response. There was e-mail help and technical support in 2001 but that system, too, was inundated. Can the Minister say what the response is likely to be in 2011 and what provisions have been made to ensure that people receive the help that they need with the forms to ensure as high a completion rate as possible? The next question relates to the overall costs of those two factors, and this was one of the assumptions to which I should be very interested to hear the answer. What assumption is being made about the number of respondents who will complete the form online? That is an interesting point because my intuitive judgment is that the figure will be significantly higher than was the case in 2001. If that is so, again, intuitively one would expect that if more people complete the form online, there will be a need for fewer enumerators to knock on doors and fewer pieces of paper to be printed and processed, and that should surely reduce and not lead to a doubling of the costs. Fourthly, my honourable friend Nick Hurd asked whether the Minister could publish the response rates to the 2009 rehearsals which the ONS and the Government conducted in a number of areas. This would place important findings in the public domain and would, had they been available, have informed the debate and perhaps allayed some unnecessary fears. Some have suggested that if the Government had found the response rates and the responses during the 2009 rehearsals helpful to their case, they might have deployed information received from them in support of these orders. Therefore, the fact that no information has been made available to the House on those rehearsals raises some concerns about confidence. Fifthly, can the Minister tell the Committee roughly what proportion of responses will be extrapolated from fields that have been left blank? I understand that statistically what happens is as follows: if all 36 questions on the form have not been responded to—if, for example, five have not been answered—the enumerator extrapolates or guesses what the response would have been. Clearly, given that the Government are placing a great deal of store on the accuracy of data, if a significant amount of the data is the result of guesswork, that will raise a serious concern. Will we be guessing 20, 30 or 40 per cent of the answers? If, for example, as we were told, more than £1 trillion of taxpayers’ money is to be directed by these data to health and local authority spend alone over the next 10 years, can we be confident that the data informing these choices are correct? Is it possible that the cost arising from misdirecting and misallocating funds could be much higher than the cost of the exercise itself? Does the Minister agree with some of the expert opinions that have been expressed about the complexity of the data? Is she aware of the remarks of Professor Rees, a leading UK statistician, to the Public Accounts Committee on 19 November, when he said that as you expand the number of questions there must be a deterrent effect on response? Has she noted those comments? Could she respond to them? Is the Minister aware of remarks that were made by Sir John Kingman, who was chairman of the Statistics Commission when the 2001 census was undertaken? He wrote to my honourable friend Nick Hurd on 28 October 2009, saying, in commenting on the nature of the census preparations for 2011: ""It all happens with the best of intentions. The ONS consults government departments, local authorities and a variety of public and private organisations hungry for information on all sorts of matters. The result however is that the unfortunate citizen is presented with an array of questions which few will have the time or inclination to take seriously. Some will put in frivolous answers"—" we have the famous example of the Jedi faith, apparently the fourth largest religious group in the United Kingdom, which came out of the 2001 census— ""while others will just put the form behind the clock on the mantelpiece"," and forget it. He continues: ""Yet the statisticians take the results seriously, and provide the interested organisations with statistics with little indication of the inevitable margin of error. In 2001 the National Statistician even announced an exact figure for the total population, a figure which later proved to be greatly in error. You will recall the problems with the population count in London and Manchester. If the Census cannot accurately count the population, how reliable can it be on matters such as number of bedrooms?"." In the previous census, 38 people were prosecuted for non-completion of forms, but 7 per cent of the households that the forms went to did not respond. What assumptions has the Minister made about the number of people who are likely to be prosecuted this time around, especially as the powers that were referred to are rather draconian? The ONS has asserted, and this was cited by my honourable friend Nick Hurd, that it will be, ""employing appropriately trained specialist field staff, dedicated solely to following-up cases of reported non-compliance and conducting the necessary formal Interviews Under Caution"." That is pretty heavy stuff, as is a £1,000 fine. It would be useful to know what assumptions have been made. What steps have been taken to stop citizens falling victim to phishing attacks? Apparently this is an IT term, although I was not familiar with it. It relates to these spam e-mails that we receive purporting to be from a bank, a building society or the Inland Revenue service. What has the ONS done to avoid such attacks from fraudsters? How many census enumerators will be hired for the 2011 census? How many of them will be trained in the issue of cautions under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in order to chase non-compliance? As was stated earlier, they are going to have the power to formally interview under caution. If those data are to be used afterwards in a court of law, they would need to follow precise guidelines. If the person is being questioned under caution, would they not also have the right to some legal representation? They may be vulnerable people who would be intimidated not only by the form and its length but by overzealous enumerators coming down to ask why they had not responded. I turn finally to overcrowding and bedrooms, which has excited great interest. I have even heard suggestions from student groups that census parties will be held on 27 March, where tens, if not hundreds, of people will be invited round to certain houses with one or two bedrooms and will all be listed, complete with their names and dates of birth, as being at that address at that time. That seems to us a step too far, a level of meddling way beyond what is necessary. Will the Minister give us a specific example of where knowing the sex, date of birth and name of the person who was staying in a property overnight on 27 to 28 March would be used to inform an aspect of government policy? In other words, when would it be useful to ask that question? When, without an answer to it, would the Government not be able to know X or Y? I am sure that it is a fairly easy question and that the Minister will be able to give many examples, but it represents a level of infringement of privacy that many people of a liberal disposition would find very uncomfortable. I am grateful to the Committee for bearing with me while I have put these questions again. I hope that the Minister can offer reassurance.