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Census (England and Wales) Order 2009

That is a very good intervention and very helpful. We need such assurances because so much information now is put on disks or whatever other storage capacity is available, such as memory sticks. Bearing in mind that some very important information regarding people’s taxation has been lost, we are entitled to know what security is available and whether a private firm is as secure as I hope our own departments are. We need those important assurances. I will move on to ethnicity. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, raised this, and it was right and proper that he did. We are becoming obsessed with two things: ethnicity and sex, which I will come to in a moment. The drive in this country should be for unity; instead of multiculturalism, we want integration. We want people to be happy that they are in Britain. We want people to feel British, and to feel that they belong here, rather than anywhere else. They should feel that they are a part of us, no matter what their colour, creed, religion, or anything else. I feel strongly that the motivation of Government, and indeed of Parliament, should be towards integration. I am not at all sure that asking people to define their ethnicity does that. My wife and I had a recent experience with our local authority in Reading—not about the census, but about the electoral registration form. We decided to test the market, so to speak, to see what would happen. I put my nationality down on the form as Welsh, and my wife said she wanted me to put hers down as English. Lo and behold, when the register was proclaimed and I got the form for next year, there it was. My nationality—Welsh—was fine. I could be Welsh, but my wife could not be English. That was very worrying. The local authority would not accept "English", so it put "England". This, of course, was a ridiculous answer to the question of nationality, because there is no such nationality as England. For three years, I have been trying to get the local authority in Reading to accept English as a nationality. I still have not succeeded—they keep blaming it on a computer. I do not know whether English is to be accepted as a nationality by all authorities now, bearing in mind that it is on the census as such, and I would be interested if the Minister could comment on that. Perhaps it is a little unfair to ask her to do so, but nevertheless if she could I would be most obliged. My wife is very offended, and I am sure there are many other people who are offended that they cannot be English. As a Welshman, I am standing up this afternoon for the English.