Examination of Witnesses (Questinos 1-128)
MR DAVID
DARTON, MR
KEITH DUGMORE
AND PROFESSOR
PHILIP REES
19 NOVEMBER 2009
Q1 Chairman: Let me welcome our witnesses
this morning for a session looking at the preparations for the
census, in particular looking today at the suggested questions
in the 2011 census. We have had hearings previously on general
preparations for the census and have not really discussed the
questions, but, because the draft census order has now reached
the House of Commons and there will eventually possibly be debate
and decision on it, it seemed useful to try to explore some of
these issues at this point. We are therefore delighted to have
Professor Philip Rees with us from the University of Leeds, Keith
Dugmore from the Demographics User Group, and David Darton from
the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Thank you very much
for coming to help us. You have given us some papers but would
you like briefly to say something by way of introduction, each
of you, as to what your perspective on the questions issue is
at this point? Mr Darton, would you like to start?
Mr Darton: Yes,
thank you. As I said in the written submission, our major concern
is the omission of a question on sexual orientation, or, more
precisely, sexual identity. I can rehearse the reasons for this
if you are interested.
Q2 Chairman: In a nutshell.
Mr Darton: It is primarily because
they are a significant group in the population in terms of their
overall size, and in particular we are concerned that there is
a lot of self-segregation that goes on in this group in terms
of self-segregating themselves into particular occupations and
particular localities that feel safe, and that that may be very
bad for the productivity of the country and for their own life
choices, and you can only pick up that sort of information and
data in the census at that local level, given the size of it.
The fact that sexual identity questions are being asked in the
future or in other surveys does not compensate for the fact that
they are being eliminated from the census, and, of course, the
census is the main source for the planning that local authorities
and service providers do. Finally, we think that there would be
an accurate enough picture of sexual orientation distribution
around the country from the census in the sense that it would
accurately reflect the sexual identity of people in the sense
of being able to identify themselves in their household, which
is a particular aspect of identity which is valuable in its own
right. We are not over concerned about the fact that everybody
chooses to identify differently in different spheres and so therefore
it is a very particular measure but a very valuable particular
measure.
Q3 Chairman: People are worried already
about the size of this census, rightly or wrongly. Could I just
ask you, if this is your proposal for inclusion do you have a
proposal for exclusion to match it?
Mr Darton: We have a letter from
the ONS that says that the reason they are excluding it at the
moment is not because of a shortage of space or a cost issue.
I think it is right, as I said in my submission, that in the end
there is a political judgment to be made in terms of the priorities
of different questions. Having said that, I think there are some—and
I am hesitant because this is not necessarily our centre of expertise
and I think you need expert advice—that on the surface look
to us as though they might be candidates. We are not sure, for
example, that the accuracy and salience of a question which asks
people about their intention to stay in the country. I think there
are two questions related to that. We have not seen evidence that
suggests that that gives a very reliable estimate, so they may
be candidates. We are not entirely certain that the bank of questions
on immigration is the best way of getting at immigration questions,
so that may be one area. There is another issue which is slightly
separate, which is whether it is really required by the Welsh
Language Act to leave a space in the England questionnaire so,
whilst it would be inadequate only to do things in England, there
is some space in the English part which I think could be utilised
better and we are certainly not convinced that the Welsh Language
Act prevents that happening, which I think has been suggested.
I think, although this is a different part of the questionnaire
because it is the household survey, that we might question the
number of rooms question on the questionnaire because we are not
sure that cognitive testing suggests that it is very accurate
anyway and it is available from other sources. I think there are
some areas and we are cognisant of the fact that this has to be
good value for money and nothing is cost free.
Q4 Chairman: Thank you very much
for that. Mr Dugmore?
Mr Dugmore: I am representing
the Demographics User Group, which is on behalf of large commercial
companies who use the census. I think it is probably sometimes
overlooked that people naturally concentrate on central government's
and local government's use and public service planning, but we
as a group have been going for more than ten years and the census
is an invaluable source of information for decision-making by
large retailers and financial service companies and so on. The
way we see it is that there are quite a lot of questions in the
census which are of broad interest to almost all groups, and one
goes back to a long history here of what has been asked in 2001
and 1991 and 1981 and so on, and then at the margins there are
questions which are of perhaps great interest to some user groups
but not to others. In our case, we are very interested in the
broad demographics and social composition status and so on of
the population. When it comes down to, for example, carers, I
would have to be straightforward and say that that is not an immediate
matter of interest to us but we recognise—and I also in
the past have chaired the Statistics Users Forum, which is a much
broader umbrella of census users—that there are a lot of
people in local authorities or social services or whatever who
are very interested in the carers' questions. I think it would
be unusual for any user group to support all questions. From our
own viewpoint we would not be immediately looking towards national
identity or citizenship or numbers of bedrooms as questions that
are of great significance to us, but obviously there will be other
users who will lobby for that and ONS does not have an easy job
of reconciling these conflicting demands. The one question that
we would like to have seen in is income, which is of interest,
obviously, to the commercial world but I think also to decision
makers across all public services, and it was obviously a finely
balanced judgment for ONS to make. We naturally pointed to the
fact that income has been asked in several other countries for
many years and has been achieved. We also look to the fact that
ethnicity was a very sensitive question back in 1981, where I
remember the Haringey census as an enumerator, where there was
a lot of public concern about ethnicity but the ground was set
and people made the case and it was successfully asked in 1991
and by 2001 it had become embedded. It would have been good if
it had been done with income, which indeed is being done in Scotland,
so that is our one particular extra if we were looking for one.
Q5 Chairman: How do you feel about
sex?
Mr Dugmore: It is okay.
Q6 Chairman: That is the right answer!
No, no. How do you feel about the argument about sexual orientation
from the commercial world?
Mr Dugmore: I think it is fair
to say that it would be well down our list of priorities. There
might be some particular target marketing in seeking to define
population segments. I certainly would not rule it out that some
of the members of the group might say, "That is quite an
interesting one; yes, we are launching a new product", or
whatever, "and we are wanting to target particular members
of the community", but it is not an obvious one for us.
Q7 Chairman: People write about the
gay pound though, do they not?
Mr Dugmore: They do.
Q8 Chairman: That is a commercial—
Mr Dugmore: Yes. I think it is
of potential interest but not right up there in the obvious ones.
Q9 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Professor Rees?
Professor Rees: Thank you very
much for inviting me to speak with you today. I am an academic,
so I have no statutory right to demand anything in the census
but I use everything that is in there and exploit it to understand
what is going on with our population and our society. My submission
put the case again for the income question. When I was co-ordinator
of the ESRC census programme, which you heard about in June from
my successor on this, David Martin from Southampton University,
in 2001 we launched a strong case for including income, so I have
repeated that. The essential case is that if you want a variable
that distinguishes between people who are poor and people who
are rich, ask them directly about the money they receive. A lot
of academic work and national statistics work has shown that proxies
constructed from other variables measuring deprivation in the
census just do not discriminate sufficiently between people, between
areas, do not identify those pockets of policy that need public
action. Obviously, having suggested an income question, which
I think the design of has been tested out thoroughly, it is not
intrusive. The income question can be administered personally
within the household and the husband can answer it A, B, C, D,
and the wife can answer it A, B, C, D, and they do not know what
their respective incomes are, so it is well designed for confidentiality
even within the household. What would I give up if space had to
be made and you were persuaded that income was a question to include?
I think the new questions on migration are extremely useful; I
will be using them, but I think they are not quite fit for the
purpose that they are intended for. They are intended to fill
the large gap in our international migration statistics but that
gap is not just for the year before the census, 2010-11; it is
for the whole of the decade. We need a robust continuing system
of measuring migration better, so I would have taken the money
from the budget and used it to persuade the Home Office to demonstrate
that the e-border system, into which enormous amounts of money
are being invested, can be used to generate statistics. They have
not yet demonstrated that and I have been pressing them in other
evidence I have given to the UK Statistics Authority on that in
the migration report that came out in July. I think I would drop
the rather awkward question about intention to stay. The people
who I have asked about this feel it is awkward. It does raise
spectres in their mind of are they going to be deported in the
near future; is this a way of collecting information, which the
census does not collect. I have absolute faith in the integrity
and confidentiality of it and of the data that is collected, but
people's perception is that this question could lead to unfortunate
consequences. The other reason I would drop the intention question
is that it sets a precedent for asking people about views of the
future. The census is designed to ask what is the situation now
or what has been happening over a year or five years, back to
your birth date, if you like, so it is information that is relatively
factual, whereas intention is pure opinion. I know there is a
reason to try and connect it to the international passenger survey
but I do not think that is the right solution to the gap in migration
statistics. In terms of evidence on the value of the income question,
I will just refer you to my PhD thesis, 1979, using a splendid
set of income data from the US census of 1960, and demonstrating
this point, that it is a much better discriminator of people in
poverty, or, in the case of commercial organisations, people who
are rich in income terms than any of the other variables. It is
better than occupation, it is better than education, it is better
than housing value. Income is a critical variable for analysing
our social and economic fabric.
Q10 Chairman: Just on that, is there
an argument though that says because we have not had an income
question in the past that is a good reason for not having it now
because we do not have the virtue of what you are describing,
which is the time series that will give us the information that
you have talked about?
Professor Rees: No, I think that
is an argument that would mean that there was no innovation at
all, so we would not have an ethnic identity question, we would
not have had lots of questions if we had not asked them for the
first time.
Q11 Chairman: Mr Darton knows about
the future because he is the Director of Foresight. On the sexual
orientation issue, so that we can move on to other ones, it did
occur to me, thinking about that, that one of the big reasons
for wanting census data is for public policy reasons: you want
to do things with it. What I am not clear about is what public
policy reasons make us want to know about people's sexual identity.
We do not provide different services, do we, for people with different
sexual orientations?
Mr Darton: I think we do potentially
provide differently tailored services in areas like health and
so on. I think though that one of the main reasons for knowing
about it is to be able to assess the size of the population in
local areas because if, for example, a local area is completely
devoid of anybody who expresses a minority sexual identity the
question has to be asked, is there something about the culture,
the nature of that area, things that local authorities and local
partnerships do have some control over, which is in a sense excluding
quite a big proportion of the population and may therefore need
changing in order for that area to be the most productive to get
the best employment force it needs and so on. I think it would
be wrong to assume that the census on its own gives you a direct
policy response. Clearly, it gives you evidence that there is
something that needs looking at. It gives you evidence that there
is something that you need to target your policy development resources
or your research resources on, and, with a forecasting hat on,
and this is well known, we are going to be in a period of pretty
tight public expenditure constraint over the next ten years. We
have recognised in Parliament that there is a duty for public
authorities to try and ensure equality, and it includes sexual
orientation, and that steps must be taken where it is shown to
end bullying, et cetera. We need to know the numbers of people
so that that money is spent effectively. People see the census
as a cost but actually these requirements are not being made for
the sake of political correctness or anything else. It is because
it affects real people's lives and we need to have basic—
Q12 Chairman: We are not asking people
whether they are short or tall or fat or thin or any of these
kinds of things, are we, all of which would be fascinating to
know?
Mr Darton: No, but I think there
is a difference which has been recognised. Sexual orientation
is one of the protected grounds in legislation. We have recognised
that with ethnicity, disability and so on there are some characteristics
where there is the potential for disadvantage or discrimination.
That is a matter of public concern and that has been recognised,
so I think sexual orientation is different in that sense, and
if we are serious about that legislation we need the data that
allows us to act effectively on it and to distribute resources
accordingly.
Q13 Chairman: You mentioned health
issues, and I can see that of course there may be—but we
do not have separate housing, separate transport system, separate
all kinds of provision for people with different sexual proclivities,
do we? Your point about if you find out there are not many in
an area, suggests a kind of cultural repression. It may indicate
there are not any.
Mr Darton: Yes, I think it may.
It suggests areas for further investigation, but I think the same
point could be made that we do not have separate services necessarily
for people of different religions, yet we ask about religion.
We do not necessarily in all areas have separate provision for
groups that are measured in the census. What this is doing is
directing you to ask the question: is it important enough that
you need to start thinking about different services?
Q14 Mr Walker: Mr Darton, why can
you not just leave gay people alone, just let them get on with
their lives? We all here do surgeries. If someone was to walk
into my surgery and I said, "By the way, before we start,
are you gay?", I would expect to be told to bugger off—sorry,
to get lost, or go and jump off a cliff. Why can you not just
relax about this? We are all pretty relaxed about it. Why are
you not relaxed about it?
Mr Darton: Because that is not
what is being fed back to us by our gay and lesbian stakeholders.
They are concerned that they have the ability to identify themselves
when they think it is appropriate. The majority of them do think
it is appropriate to identify themselves within the census. I
also think that if you say this is a private issue and not a public
issue that is completely wrong. There is a huge amount of evidence
on the devastating impact on people's lives that comes from harassment,
bullying, targeted violence. We have recognised all of that. There
are also, or have been, considerable examples, but we do not know
the quantification, for example, of discrimination in the workplace.
That actually affects the productivity of the country and it affects
the economy. I think it is frankly ludicrous to suggest that this
issue is purely a private one and I do not think most gay and
lesbian people would agree with you.
Q15 Mr Walker: I think you spend
a lot of time with pressure groups who clearly want to promote
their interests, but I personally find your approach and the approach
of people like you deeply patronising, and I know, like you, a
number of gay people. They do not all share your view. In fact,
they are fed up at being defined by their sexuality and you seem
to want to perpetuate this problem. You are determined to make
it a problem and keep it going as a problem.
Mr Darton: To be frank, I think
it is patronising to say what you have just said because people
define themselves in different ways in different situations. Nobody
wants to be identified by a single characteristic all the time
and on every occasion, but people do want the right to identify
themselves with certain characteristics when they feel that that
would be helpful to them. If I were a gay man I would not want
to necessarily identify myself as such at this particular point
or when I am socialising or something, but in a health surgery
I may well want to. There are different occasions when people
want to identify different aspects of their identity, and it seems
to me that if we are serious about the legislation that we already
have in this area, if we are serious about having legislation
in this area because we recognise that this is an identity issue
which causes real distress and problems in people's lives sometimes,
but we are not willing to measure it at all, unlike any of the
other characteristics, then, frankly, I think that is patronising.
Q16 Mr Walker: Finally, Chairman,
out of solidarity with gay people, if we get this in the census
I shall define myself as gay then, because, quite frankly, I think
it is a ridiculous question and I am more than happy to define
myself as homosexual. I am not but it is such a silly question
and I might as well—
Mr Darton: Okay, that may be your
view but I have to say that we have done some research recently
on how people would identify themselves in different survey situations.
I have to say that because we do not have decent population estimates
this has to be taken as large-scale qualitative work, but we interviewed
3,000 people who had declared themselves to have a minority sexual
orientation and then asked them how they would define themselves
in a situation in the household where other people knew what they
would say, and the vast majority of them would identify themselves
in the same way, but there is a minority who, for one reason or
another, choose in those circumstances to identify themselves
differently, and one can make models to create estimates as a
result of that information. I do not want to say that that data
is robust in numerical terms, but it is clear. If you had 3,000
people that you had spoken to as a result of, say, having 300
focus groups around the country and they were all broadly saying
the same thing and they had a very diverse range of the population,
you would take some notice of that as qualitative evidence, and,
frankly, that qualitative evidence does not suggest what you are
suggesting. It suggests that most people would take it seriously
and that most people would answer in a way that is appropriate.
Q17 Chairman: Just finally on this,
if it turned out that large numbers of people did not want to
declare their sexual identity on a census form, and you said yourself
just now that you would not want to proclaim it, filling in an
official census form is quite a thing. If people do not want to
do that there would be no point asking the question, would there,
and we know on the income question that the answer against the
income question is that it shows—or at the least the argument
is—that it has a depressing effect on returns?
Mr Darton: I think this is partly
a matter of judgment. We are respectful of the fact that some
people still see this as a personal issue and one that they do
not want to declare. We are suggesting that it is a voluntary
question in the same way as the religion question. There is no
suggestion that anybody is going to be forced against their will
to declare their sexual identity, so that is one point. The second
point is, frankly, there is no direct evidence that suggests this
would have a dampening effect on the overall completion rate of
the census. When we asked the ONS about this they did send some
information but it was mainly saying that they were worried about
it because there was some sign in relation to controversial questions
like the income question, for example, that there could be some
dampening effect. There is not actually any direct evidence that
this one would have a dampening effect, I do not think, and it
is also partly a matter of how well the census is promoted and
what is said about it at the time, and as for why this would be
any greater an issue than, say, was the furore around having the
ethnicity question introduced for the first time two decades ago,
I am not sure. It feels as though the standards being applied
in this case are somewhat different.
Chairman: Right—let us move from
sex to religion.
Q18 Kelvin Hopkins: The British Humanist
Association, and I think your own organisation, have raised this
with the ONS. I think there is a fair point, I hope you agree,
that the way the question is phrased at the moment, "What
is your religion?", tends to depress the numbers of those
who are not necessarily religious and so you get a false reading.
Some of us have lobbied for a change to that question and I am
wondering what your view is.
Mr Darton: I think this is extremely
difficult and it is the one I have to be frank about and say we
are less certain about what the correct solution is compared to
some of the other points that we have been making. I think there
are two related issues. One is making the question non-leading,
not assuming that you are in a religion, and we and others have
suggested a different stem to the question and we believe that
it could be made less leading in that sense. The other aspect
is the issue about whether, as the legislation does, you attempt
to do anything on the religion question which covers beliefs other
than religious beliefs. That, I think, is much harder. I agree
with the ONS that in the testing they have been able to do at
the moment the term "belief" added to the question confuses
people and it is not clear what people are responding to when
they respond to that. Our view is that we should change the question
to make it less leading in the stem, so it should be more neutral
than, "What is your religion?"; it should be more along
the lines of, "Do you have a religion?", or some such
thing. It does need further testing and we are sympathetic to
the problems and issues that the ONS have in doing this, but we
do think there should be some more work done and that it is possible
to have a less leading one. The other area of complexity, and
this is similar to the sexual orientation one we were talking
about earlier, is that there are different concepts, obviously,
of belonging to, being affiliated to, having beliefs and so on
associated with religion. The ONS has come to the view that a
broad affiliation question is a better basis for their modelling
estimates of the other things than having a question which asks
directly about belonging. I think that is a matter of judgment.
I do not necessarily disagree with it. I do not think there is
overwhelming evidence for it, but as long as one is clear what
aspect of religion one is measuring in the question and it is
non-leading then those are the two criteria and we would be happy
with an affiliation question which took out the bias in the stem.
Q19 Kelvin Hopkins: I must say I
have come up with my own formulation as a compromise, in a sense,
because I know it opens up all sorts of qualifications if you
have a complicated question, but if the question was, "If
you have a religion, what is it?", you would get a much better
response, if you just put that clause at the front of the question.
Mr Darton: I think there are a
number of options like that. The problem is that they have not
all been tested. In terms of the best out of a number of options
one has to make a judgment on the basis of what is tested. I think
there is just about still time to do some more testing, I am not
certain, but I certainly think with the current question there
is enough evidence to suggest that it is leading and it does give
considerably higher estimates for particularly loose affiliations
with Christianity than other questions would give.
Q20 Kelvin Hopkins: That touches
on another problem where people have a heritage which they are
often very proud of—a Jewish heritage, a Sikh heritage;
but may not be religious. Expanding or building cultural heritage
into the ethnicity question, "What is your ethnicity?",
I believe would overcome that problem. Have you given any thought
to that?
Mr Darton: We have given some
thought to it. Again, I think there is no easy solution. When
you talk to the sorts of groups you have just mentioned there
seems to be a division. Some of them are happy to see it encapsulated
in the ethnicity questions; others prefer it to stand alone in
the religious question. There has been a concern, I know, that
Sikhs in particular would be less counted, as it were, if it were
taken out of the religion question. I do not think there are easy
answers in this area but I do think that in the absence of a perfect
answer it could be made better by making the stem of the question
less leading.
Q21 Kelvin Hopkins: I just think
that if the question was ethnicity or cultural heritage, just
broadening that slightly, would overcome the problem, certainly
in my constituency where I have a very wide range of people from
a whole range of different ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds.
Mr Darton: It seems to me that
you may be right or you may not be and one would have to test
how people out there responded to the term and how they interpreted
the term. In the absence of that test I think for now leaving
the ethnic question broadly comparable with the last one is probably
the right decision. That would be my view on balance but I do
accept that it needs further exploration for next time.
Q22 Paul Rowen: I would like to ask
a question about migration and ask Professor Rees to start with.
Why do you think the migration questions were included?
Professor Rees: There is a great
concern that we do not have accurate international migration statistics
so we do not know very reliably how many people are coming into
the country. We do not know even less reliably how many people
are leaving the country and we do not know where they are going.
The Office for National Statistics uses a very small part of the
international passenger survey to make their national estimates.
It is of the order of 4,000 or 5,000 respondents coming through
airports or seaports, so our knowledge is very lacking. This was
all reviewed by the UK Statistics Authority earlier in the year.
It was reviewed last year by the Treasury Select Committee. My
interpretation, which the Director may confirm or deny, is that
adding additional questions into the census was seen as satisfying
this demand. The argument I would make—and as an academic
I will use all the answers but only for one year—is that
we need a more fundamental think about how to generate accurate
figures for the total numbers involved across our borders and
settling and staying for different lengths of time.
Q23 Paul Rowen: If I could take you
up on that, how accurate is it that you are going to be? People
come into this country for a number of reasons. There are asylum
seekers. There are failed asylum seekers, people who are trying
to avoid the system. There are people on visit visas. There are
people on spouse visas. There are people on work permits. How
does the question, "How long do you intend to stay in the
UK?", provide any sense of or reliable information about
why people are coming in? If I am on a spouse visa I might want
to say, "I am going to be here for ever".
Professor Rees: I think what you
are arguing for is even more migration questions in the census.
Q24 Paul Rowen: No, I am supporting
you. I actually think that it is quite ridiculous, or would you
not agree, that a ten-year census is trying to measure something
that is a snapshot because actually it is a dynamic that is moving
and changing all the time? You cannot do something that is reliable
in one census, because of the range of issues that that one question
poses, for it to have any meaningful statistical value.
Professor Rees: Yes, I would agree
with you. The kind of investigation intended behind those questions
could well have been done with a targeted survey of migrants.
Q25 Paul Rowen: Is not the real reason
that the Home Office at the fag end of the last Tory Government
abolished the system of counting people in and counting people
out? The UK Borders Agency has been singularly unable to manage
its caseload to have any reliable figures as to where people are
in the system, and even the new e-border system does not count
everybody because if you are a child you are not going in and
out of the country; you are not properly recorded. Is it not a
political attempt to say, "We are doing something about this",
whereas in reality it is a sticking plaster to cover a gaping
hole?
Professor Rees: That would be
my general view, but, just to defend the Office's proposals, behind
the question is an attempt to link up and understand what the
current instrument, the international passenger survey, which
does ask an intention question, is providing and test its reliability.
I think that is the thinking behind it. I do not think it is the
right thinking.
Q26 Paul Rowen: I get failed asylum
seekers coming into my surgery. They have lost their right to
remain in the country and many of them are sleeping on people's
couches, or whatever. Do you honestly think that when the survey
is done those people are going to put their hands up and say,
"Yes, I stop at that flat and I am an illegal immigrant.
Please deport me"?
Professor Rees: No, of course
not.
Q27 Paul Rowen: So is it not a meaningless,
useless question?
Professor Rees: Yes. The intention
question, I think, will get lots of incorrect answers.
Q28 Paul Rowen: Putting the other
side of the thing, one of the reasons, I suspect, this has been
included is that people like local authorities complained bitterly
after the last census that the government grants that were targeted
to them were based on census data that were widely inaccurate.
If you take a borough like Haringey, for example, where the numbers
of people moving in and out of the borough are huge in any one
year, is this an attempt to provide some reliable data? Do you
think that is the reason?
Mr Dugmore: There has obviously
been real pressure to try to improve migration statistics in any
way that can be done, and I think that in looking around for almost
anything that would help the census was thought to be one thing
that might help a bit. I have real doubts about the intention
to stay question, as to whether people would answer it. The very
people you are interested in are less likely to answer it. I would
support Phil's comments about the use of administrative data,
not just the e-borders data but in particular national insurance
number data. I had an inquiry only yesterday from one of the big
retailers who are interested in the local Polish populations around
the country, a predictable question, and one naturally turns to
national insurance numbers as an indicator.
Q29 Paul Rowen: But if you are a
non-EU and you have not got the right to remain, or if you are
a student, you will not be given a national insurance number.
Mr Dugmore: That is quite true.
It is not perfect, but in the commercial world people are often
looking for good pointers and insights rather than the seeking
of perfect numbers. One would naturally look towards administrative
sources because they are continuously refreshed month by month,
quarter by quarter, or whatever, and typically they are available
for small areas, and when you look at the numbers you can think,
"That is plausible, 8,000 of a particular category in Oxford.",
or whatever it is, "Yes, this is giving us a sense of some
reality", and so I think that is where the real progress
will be made on migration.
Professor Rees: If I could comment
on that, you made a comment that some local authorities were unhappy
with the 2001 census results, the population counts for their
areas. I do not think that was the fault of the census. It was
that their expectations were based on the rolled forward population
estimates from the previous census, and those are: add births,
take away deaths, add immigrants, take away emigrants. The problem
was that the migration counts were poorly estimated. Westminster
was allocated far more immigrants than had actually arrived because
when you arrive at Heathrow airport you are asked where you are
going, so you say central London, and you get allocated to Westminster
but you may be going somewhere quite different within London because
your knowledge of the geography of the place is probably non-existent,
so Westminster's beef last time with national statistics was a
result of being misled by the population estimates. That is why
getting the migration statistics right year by year through the
decade is so vital, so that they are reasonably close, local authority
by local authority in 2011, to what people are expecting to happen
in the census.
Q30 Paul Rowen: So is this question
statistically reliable or is it just a political gesture?
Professor Rees: You will have
to ask that of the Director.
Q31 Paul Rowen: You are a statistician
and, given the points I have made about the various people who
are here for various reasons and whatnot, is that going to produce
reliable statistics?
Professor Rees: I do not think
the research has been done on it, the in-depth research on the
reliability of the question.
Q32 Chairman: As I understand it,
though, Professor Rees, your essential argument is that instead
of bothering about, as it were, trying to refine the migration
questions in the census it would be much better simply to put
some money and effort into making sure that all the data sources
that would be available to the Home Office were put together properly
so that we get some reliable migration figures from that collection
of source data.
Professor Rees: That is my basic
argument, yes.
Q33 Chairman: Is that just idiosyncratic
to you or is that an argument that is widely shared?
Mr Dugmore: I would say it is
widely shared and, thinking back to the Treasury Sub-Committee
a year or so ago on counting the population, that was a theme
that came out pretty strongly, that administrative sources were
ahead on tracking the population.
Chairman: We will pursue that a little
later.
Q34 David Heyes: It is interesting,
is it not, that, in terms of the arguments that are deployed against
the inclusion of those migration questions in the census, very
similar arguments are used in the opposite direction in relation
to income? You argue strongly that income should be included,
Professor, and yourself, Mr Dugmore, and yet all the same criticisms
could be made that you have just been making about including migration
statistics, that people will be coy about giving truthful answers,
the deterrent effect. In fact, the argument is that they are of
less use for not including income. Help me to understand that.
Professor Rees: The income question
has been used in national government surveys for a long time.
It is a well tested question in the labour force survey and its
successors and in the forthcoming integrated household survey
a household income question is used, and also in the expenditure
on food survey, which was going into the integrated household
survey. In that sense it has a much better pedigree than the set
of migration questions. It has also been used successfully, as
I said, pointing to my PhD thesis, in other countries on a regular
basis. What is the alternative? The alternative is for Parliament
to ask Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs to generate from their
administrative database the equivalent neighbourhood statistics
on the distribution of income, again using very broad and non-disclosive
classes. That would be an excellent source of information year
by year.
Mr Dugmore: If I may just add
to that, in the case of migration often one is looking at ebbs
and flows and changes of fairly short order if you think of migration
from eastern Europe and so on, and a lot change in a few months,
or certainly a year or two. With an income question, yes, I think
over a long period of time there may be some gradual shifts, but
a lot of the measure would be fairly fundamental and would last
for several years. When one looks at social classifications across
the country it is quite striking that, whilst there might be a
few areas that change dramatically, many areas do not, and I fancy
that if income were to be asked this time and ten years hence
the broad distributions across the country might well be broadly
similar.
Q35 David Heyes: I think Professor
Rees was saying that you would get better quality data if HMRC
could be obliged to provide it than you could ever hope to get
out of the census.
Professor Rees: Yes, we could.
Q36 David Heyes: You would still
argue for it being included in the census. How do other countries
get round this? Scotland presumably are satisfied that they can
deal with the kinds of problems that have been listed. There are
comparable countries that have dealt with this. What is the difference?
Why do they do it and we cannot?
Professor Rees: In the US case
they have asked for income for decades, so everyone is very used
to supplying that information at the time of the census. In Britain
it is routinely asked in household surveys, in commercial surveys.
When you fill in your warranty card for your latest electronic
household apparatus you are often asked for your income in more
detail than in the proposed census question, so people by now
are fairly comfortable about reporting their income, a very blurred
and non-disclosive form of their income. Just to pick up your
point earlier about the impact of an income question on response,
that certainly was not the case in the census test in Scotland.
They decided there was not an impact. In the case of England and
Wales there was a statistically significant difference. It was
between—and here I am doing it from memory so it would need
correction—51 and 52.5 %, so 51 % in those test areas which
had an income question responded to and 52.5 % in those areas
which did not. It turned out, because of the size of the England
and Wales census test, to be statistically significant but in
terms of importance I do not think it was sufficient to eject
the question.
Mr Darton: Although there are
alternative sources of income data, they could be better, such
as the suggestion made for the Inland Revenue. The advantage of
having it on the census is, of course, that it helps you understand
and take a lot more value from some of the other questions on
the census. It is clear that the experience of various categories
of people that you might measure in the census, say, somebody
with a disability in their service needs, is likely to be quite
different, depending on their level of income, just as one example.
I think the case for putting the income question in, and we raise
it as putting it in the census, is that there is a clear and well-established
relationship between socioeconomic conditions and other things
that we are trying to assess with the census and it is therefore
important to have it in the same survey.
Q37 David Heyes: Just one last question
for Professor Rees, if I may. You would argue that the deterrent
effect is fairly negligible, as evidenced by the testing that
has taken place. Is there any evidence, perhaps from overseas,
of the numerical difference between the response on a test, which
people know is a test and therefore does not have legal power
behind it, and the actual census, which is accompanied by the
kind of publicity campaign that says you must do this, it is a
legal obligation? Does the power of compulsion make a difference
to the response rate?
Professor Rees: It does in general
in the census survey. The response rate is around 50 to 60 % in
the tests and it is going to be 92 to 98 % in the census. I do
not know of any evidence from other countries to answer directly
your question but the Director of National Statistics or the Director
of the Census may be able to answer that question.
Q38 Chairman: In your opening remarks,
Professor Rees, though, on income you said that a reason for having
it in the census was that the other sources where it was used
and tested had defects attached to them. Now, though, you have
been arguing that in fact their pedigree is shown by the fact
that they have been so successful in the labour survey and in
the household survey and therefore it would be easy to do it in
the census. One of these things has to be true, but I do not think
they can both be true, can they?
Professor Rees: Asking an income
question in the surveys does not deliver you the detailed geographical
information and tables that you need, so that is the key reason
for having an income question in the census. When I referred to
the other instruments what I meant was the other variables which
are used essentially as proxies for income, so unemployment, for
example, or very low skilled employment and activity rates in
the labour force, which can be measured with the existing questions
in the census. ONS and others have then attempted to construct
a synthetic income estimate for small areas, so there is a ward
income value. The problem with that is that it does not contain
any more information about the distribution of income than the
variables that have been used on the right-hand side of the equation
to predict this income, and income distributions are much more
varied than that. The illustration I use with my students is this.
Assume you have knowledge of the distribution of lawyers across
your city, and there are lawyers living in most of the wards,
and then you apply the average income that you know from your
survey of lawyers. You would be overestimating the lawyers who
lived in poor districts, because there are poor lawyers (perhaps),
and underestimating them in rich areas. In particular an income
question will enable you to pick out the clusters of poor people
in rich areas, but if you use area averages in your indices of
deprivation which feed through to the funding distribution formulae
in probably a dozen government functions you are going to miss
out those pockets of poverty in rich areas.
Q39 Chairman: An income question
would simply be the one that asked what your income was each week?
Professor Rees: Yes, that is right.
Q40 Chairman: It would not ask what
the source of the income was.
Professor Rees: No. You would
be asked to include benefits as well as earnings.
Q41 Mr Prentice: But surely the simple
thing to do would be just to ask HMRC to publish figures for small
areas? Obviously, they would not have information on people who
do not pay tax, for example, so that is a problem, but why do
we not just ask the Inland Revenue to publish the information
they have for smaller areas than they do at the moment?
Professor Rees: That would be
an excellent suggestion.
Q42 Mr Prentice: It would be dead
easy, would it not?
Professor Rees: I do not know.
Q43 Mr Prentice: Yes, it would.
Mr Dugmore: Could I add to that
in terms of yes, I think it would be a great thing to head for;
we need to get some good information on income in small areas,
but it would stand in isolation and, of course, the great advantage
of the census is the possibility of relating income to other variables
as well, so that would be the attraction of asking it still within
the census, unless the HMRC records were to be merged into a census
database, which is quite a long way ahead, I think.
Q44 Mr Prentice: And that would hold
true even if the information were published at a neighbourhood
level, a very small area level? You could make the correlation,
surely?
Mr Dugmore: Yes, I think it would
give material to play with, but it is rather like some of the
other statistics we have from administrative sources at the moment
on unemployment and claimants and so on. They tend to be single
slices and you can look at small areas and think, "Yes, they
are there and not somewhere else", but you cannot then analyse
them in terms of housing tenure or ethnic origin or some of the
other questions you are asking.
Q45 Mr Prentice: The last census
was three pages long and the next census is going to be four pages.
I read somewhere in my briefing material that when the methodology
was tested there was no decline in response just with the addition
of the extra page. How far could we go in asking people to fill
in the census? What about a five-page census next time?
Professor Rees: There is a certain
cost to the public purse of each page. The Director of the Census
can give you an estimate of that. It is a serious matter of public
expenditure. The key innovation in the administration of the 2011
census is the ability of the householder to fill it in online
via the internet, and that makes it very cheap to add further
pages should this Committee or Parliament wish.
Q46 Mr Prentice: It is the deterrent
effect of having the extra page, that is what I am after. It would
have no effect on the response rate, that is what you are saying?
Professor Rees: No, it would do.
Q47 Mr Prentice: What about a fifth
page then?
Professor Rees: As you expand
the number of questions there must be a deterrent effect on response.
Not necessarily on surveying the form, which is a legal requirement,
but in completing all of the questions. That is where the internet
version is very useful because it is very easy to go through,
you are not disturbed by having to read questions you do not have
to read, there is a routing through it. I was privileged that
National Statistics asked a set of people, including academics,
after the census rehearsal this October to test out the internet
questionnaire. I think it is the best internet questionnaire and
easiest to complete I have ever done.
Q48 Mr Prentice: I understand all
that, but when the testing was done in Newham and wherever else,
the fourth page was not seen as a deterrent but you are telling
us there may be a problem with accuracy. I think you did tell
us that people would not necessarily fill in the forms as accurately
as they might have done if the census was shorter. Is that not
what you told us?
Professor Rees: I think I am straying
outside my area of expertise here.
Q49 Mr Prentice: Okay.
Professor Rees: It is simply that
if you were to look at the total body of information provided
by 60 million people over the 40 questions, or slightly less than
that, in the 2001 census and asked how many of the data items—60
million times 35, or whatever it was—actually depended on
completed answers from forms, you knock out five per cent because
of non-response in the census and those that had to be invented,
but then there is the whole edit and imputation process which
the census very skilfully implements to fill in all the forms
that have not been completed. My estimate, and I think it has
been confirmed by others, is of that huge data matrix only 60
% of it actually depends on people who have put some mark on the
piece of paper.[1]
Q50 Mr Prentice: Amazing.
Professor Rees: Yes, it is amazing.
That has always been the case. It is the dirty secret of the census!
That is why we need a very sophisticated statistical methodology
which is built into the edit and imputation operation, it is built
into what is called the one number census, add that five per cent
missing. There is incredible expertise that is gathered in National
Statistics to produce a really good reliable product because Joe
Public does not manage to get to the end of the form quite often.
Mr Prentice: We know the dirty secret
now!
Q51 Kelvin Hopkins: Is not the important
thing to have meaningful time series and if they make the same
mistakes in every census you get the meaningful time series? If
you suddenly clean it up and make people answer more questions,
in a sense the time series breaks down.
Professor Rees: What you need
is more reliable ways of filling in those missing answers and
the best statistical methodology is used for that. There is a
phrase in the statistics profession that is "borrowing from
strength", so if you have a household and only half the record
is filled in you look for another household nearby that matches
your completed variables and then you borrow the response from
somebody who has returned it. That is the basic operation that
goes on.
Q52 Chairman: Another dirty secret!
Mr Dugmore: No further dirty secrets
here! I would just like to pick up the point about the number
of pages, and I am sure you are right that logically it must begin
to fade and I think those of us who have lobbied for questions
have lurking behind the feeling that you cannot just keep on adding
more and more questions. I suppose the pleasant surprise was when
the test was done for 2007 and the difference between three and
four pages in statistical terms did not show any difference. I
am sure had it been five or six decay would set in. We do have
evidence there is not such a difference.
Q53 Mr Prentice: Can I just ask Professor
Rees, because you are the population expert, in future immigration
into the United Kingdom British people marrying overseas spouses
will be a large component, and we have read the speculation in
the papers about the UK population going beyond 70 million, is
it possible to forecast meaningfully future trends in intercontinental
marriage, or is that just impossible?
Professor Rees: I do not know
anyone who has done it. I speak as a husband of an immigrant,
and long may that flow continue. I am currently engaged in a project
which is attempting to forecast for the UK and its local areas
the ethnic composition of the population and we will have to make
estimates of the flows of immigrants and emigrants to and from
the different origin countries that people come from.
Q54 Mr Prentice: It is whether it
is a first generation thing, or second or third generation thing,
people going back—we are talking about the Asian subcontinent
here—for their spouses. That would have a huge impact on
future immigration into the United Kingdom, would it not?
Professor Rees: I do not know.
If you look at the estimates of regional origin of immigrants
over time, for those from South Asia, although the immigration
for participation in the labour force has gone down substantially
and is controlled by various regulations and laws, the total immigration
has been very flat, the family reunification immigration has continued,
and will continue. One of my PhD students born in the UK of Pakistani
origin found his wife in Pakistan.
Q55 Mr Prentice: That is the point;
it is the non-controlled part of immigration. The controlled part
is the points system and all that kind of stuff. My question is,
given it is such a big percentage of total immigration into the
United Kingdom, whether it is possible to forecast and you are
saying it is not really.
Professor Rees: I would have a
go. Obviously it depends entirely on the legislative framework
for that migration. I would anticipate a continuing flow of migrants
from South Asia marrying spouses in this country, yes.
Chairman: Before we go into the wider
issues, all of which are fascinating, we will have to thank you
for the session this morning. Thank you for expressing your general
views and your reservations about certain questions and on the
whole your endorsement of the questions in general, but raising
the particular issues you wanted to talk to us about. Thank you
very much for that. We shall pursue those now with those responsible
for it. Thank you very much indeed.
Q56 Chairman: Let us move seamlessly
into our second half. We are delighted to welcome Jil Matheson,
who is the new National Statistician. We met your predecessor
on a number of occasions and we are delighted to welcome to you.
Glen Watson, who we have met before, is the Census Director at
ONS. Thank you very much indeed for coming. I am sure we are going
to ask you about the issues that we were talking about in the
previous session, but can I ask you a general question to start
with. How open are you at this stage to making amendments in the
kinds of areas that we have just been talking about?
1 Note from witness: The correct figure is 90 %. Of
the 10 % of data that was imputed in the 2001 Census, 6 % was
missed because people did not return a questionnaire at all, and
4 % because some questions were left unanswered by those that
did return a questionnaire. Back
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