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Census (England and Wales) Order 2009

The short answer is that the main reasons for the increase are the extra £150 million due to inflation, the £25 million due to growth on numbers of people or households, the £25 million for the extra page of questions for each person, the extra £45 million for improvements in field systems and processors—those actually working on the 27th, making sure that the hard-to-reach people are visited and that censuses are delivered and sent back—and the extra £20 million for improved help facilities, publicity, community and local authority liaison, with a variety of other smaller changes and improvements. I hope that answers more fully the noble Lord’s question. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, also asked about the justification for the cost as a general question. The full 2011 census business case has been produced, which will fully justify the census investment. For a subset of the different uses, the benefit has been assessed as exceeding £700 million. This is thought to be a significant underestimate of the total benefits. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, talked about the assumptions that were made about the level of response when awarding the contract to Lockheed Martin. We believe that we will get a 94 per cent overall response, and that was the assumption when awarding that contract. The noble Lords, Lord Bates, Lord Maclennan and Lord Stoddart, raised the issue of security and the awarding of the contract. The contract for the census was awarded to Lockheed Martin UK as it offered the best value for money in an open-procurement scheme carried out under European Union law and EU procurement directive. The company has a good track record on census work, having supported the 2001 UK census. All persons acting in any capacity for the UK Statistics Authority in the conduct of the census will be covered by the same stringent confidentiality restrictions as are applied to members of the Office for National Statistics themselves. There are severe penalties, as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, was saying, for breaches of census confidentiality laws. No Lockheed Martin employees will have access to the data.