Guesswork and the census

• ACCORDING to last year’s census, the population of Camden has fallen, (Population of Camden has fallen, June 30). But how seriously should we take census figures?

I cannot claim that my own boycott of the last census (Count me out, March 11 2021) had anything to do with the change, since I have opted out of all five of the censuses held during my time in the borough.

However anecdotal evidence does suggest that increasing numbers of people have actively boycotted the census in recent decades and many more have just passively ignored it.

Furthermore resources put into trying to ensure a reliable count – and hence the level of
on-the-ground engagement by enumerators – has been cut back on the last few occasions. This has exacerbated the under-counting caused by inner-city areas having a significant transient population.

The rot had set in already by the time of the 2001 census; so much so, in fact, that the statisticians themselves admitted that the adjustments they needed on that occasion, to try to “correct” their figures (possibly involving a million uncounted people), were largely guesswork.

Indeed, how could they be otherwise, since the census figures (fairly definitive generations ago) are precisely the baseline against which corrections to other statistics are made.

Maybe the local population has been going down; but the census figures are not reliable evidence of that.

ALBERT BEALE
Little Russell Street, WC1