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The issue of London's population and the 2011 Census could not be more vital to discussions on London's future: without an accurate, accepted calculation of who lives in London, all other discussions about services in the capital are undermined.
The acknowledged undercounting of London's population in the 2001 Census continues to have an effect on the funding provided to London's boroughs for the services they are expected to provide for the capital's population. Perceived inaccuracies in population estimates and projections based on the 2001 Census are eroding the confidence of London boroughs in the quality of the official statistics on which funding decisions are based.
The London Regional Committee has examined the preparations being made for the 2011 Census in London. We recognise the substantial lessons learned from the 2001 exercise and the improvements which have been made to arrangements for the conduct of the Census. We nevertheless share the serious concerns of several London boroughs about whether the preparations being made for the 2011 Census in London risk a repeat of the difficulties of 2001, through significant levels of non-response to the Census and the difficulties of accurate imputation of population figures to compensate.
We make specific recommendations for the Office for National Statistics to address potential problems with recruitment of skilled enumerators and the local knowledge required to ensure the successful delivery and collection of Census forms.
We recommend that ONS discuss with London boroughs the methodology it proposes to use for the imputation of missing returns into Census outputs, in order to share expertise on the particular population profiles in each borough.
We welcome the creation of a national address register for the census, but find it barely credible that this valuable resource is not to be maintained after 2011. We recommend that the Government deal with the intellectual property issues which inhibit maintenance of the register as a matter of urgency.
We emphasise the importance to Londoners of completing Census forms accurately: this is vital to ensure that public services in London are properly provided for over the next decade.
We strongly support a successful, properly-resourced 2011 Census as the only means of providing as accurate a picture as possible of London's population in 2011 and beyond.
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