Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister
Posted on 07/10/2010 1:39:18 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Census, which takes place every 10 years, was an expensive and inaccurate way of measuring the number of people in Britain.
Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister
Instead, the Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies.
It will represent a historic shift in the way that information about the nation’s population, religion and social habits is gathered.
The suggestion is likely to be approved by Cabinet next week. It will be too late to prevent the next Census on March 27, 2011 from going ahead, although Mr Maude said he was looking at ways of reducing the £482million cost.
Britain has carried out a Census every decade since 1801, with the exception of 1941 during the Second World War.
It is the only time that everybody in the country is counted, and is used by the Government to determine spending priorities and track population movements.
Academics, charities and religious organisations all rely on information gathered in the Census as it asks wide-ranging questions relating to people’s households, nationality, faith and marital status.
The information is also a significant source of research for future generations. The online publication last year of the 1911 Census proved hugely popular, with three million people accessing the database within its first few months.
Mr Maude, who has responsibility for the Census, told The Daily Telegraph that the Government was looking for a “fundamentally” better way of doing it. “There are, I believe, ways of doing this which will provide better, quicker information, more frequently and cheaper,” he said.
Mr Maude said Britain needed a new way to keep track of the population because the Census
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
it does make sense. After all, everyone has an SSN in the US and a NI number in the UK, plus there is a tracking of births, deaths, migrations out and migrations in etc., so an accurate number of legal residents should not be that difficult to obtain from existing government databases
I wonder if the Aboriginals do...
SSNs don’t show COLOR!!!!!
They were encumbered for most of a century with what were known as "rotten boroughs" where the "notables" had decided a handful of rich guys should get a seat yet neighborhoods with tens of thousands of people shouldn't.
One of the reasons for a controlled census is that you see what is being done "up front". Without it you end up with the "notables" distorting the results for their own purposes ~ and in a most hidden fashion.
Think of a non-census census as being little different than a United Nations sponsored climate change model.
We all know how that turned out!
I’d rather see them cutting somewhere else than eliminating this important once-per-decade activity. Census cannot be replaced by survey or registration. I’m talking only about counting head, not the additional module that sometimes the US Bureau of Census attached in the long form of questionnaires.
who really cares about color? And color is hardly a determinant —> Arabs, Iranis and North Indians are caucasians and brown in color, while South Indians are Caucasian and dark brown. Many people of African origin are light enough to be close to white and most people who classify themselves as “black” have a large % of European blood.
It'll probably be replaced by a Population Czar, who'll just announce how many and where they're located. Save all that money for the people, donchaknow.
I think that dropping the census is a good idea for the US too. (It’s a waste of time and money— but then how could Barack inflate job-creation numbers without it?) The politicians, though, will choose a method that will allow them to manipulate population numbers to suit their purposes. What a world.
If a society were truly 'color' blind, they would need nothing else. This demonstrates that GOVERNMENT panders to certain groups at the expense of others. A very simple tenet....
Just as unemployed persons in the US who have stopped looking for a job are NOT counted in the unemployment figures, thus distorting unemployment reality in the US, so, in UK, people without a credit rating or evidence of participation in commerce will not be counted either. They will cease to exist and social programs will be based upon, and reduced, by being based only on persons “of economic record”, instead of actual existence. Perhaps illiterate, unemployed Islamic persons in UK, rapidly expanding by virtue of rabbit-like birth rates, will not be counted at all.
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