The coalition government, in its search for economies, is in the process of deciding to scrap the Office for National Statistics’ ten-yearly household census. It favours a piecemeal approach based on public and private databases.

... critics raised concerns that the new methods will fail to provide the same detailed picture of the nation’s population, religion and social habits and described the decision as regrettable and a terrible mistake. ... Geoffrey Robertson QC, a constitutional barrister, said the news was ‘regrettable’ because since some sort of count had been carried out by the monarch or government of Britain for more than 1,000 years. ‘Future historians will be less able to interpret Britain as a result of this decision — maybe that is the reason for it.’ David Green, a director of the Civitas think tank, called the decision ‘a terrible mistake’. ‘It is a question of whether the alternatives are reliable. The census is expensive but I think it is worth the money for the historic continuity.’

Next year’s national Census cannot be stopped, but will be subject to unspecified economies. The implications for the content of the questionnaire, which currently allows “whites” to specify their ethnicity, the first box in this section being “English - Welsh - Scottish - Northern Irish - British”, and for the resultant database, due to be available from the middle of 2012, is now uncertain. Thereafter, it is difficult to see how information on ethnicity can be extracted from other databases. Country of birth, yes, but racial origin, no. The process of replacement cannot be accurately measured without that information, and that does not help us at all.