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

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10584385 "National census in 2011 could be last of its kind"

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."

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?

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.

Datashine is probably the best representation of the previous (2011) UK census data:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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]

Some ads/incentives here and there to remind people to fill it and one should have 90%+ completion rate.

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

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

> 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.