Census whistleblower says home visits ‘waste of time’
A WHISTLEBLOWER has revealed the chaotic way teams of door knockers were deployed to try to improve Scotland’s woeful census completion rate.
More than 325,000 Scottish households failed to complete the compulsory survey despite SNP ministers being forced into a costly and humiliating deadline extension and the threat of a £1,000 fine.
Paid teams were sent out to remind people to fill in the census and help them complete it, but the disjointed co-ordination of how they were deployed has been exposed, with the same doors knocked repeatedly while many seemed to be ignored.
The whistleblower revealed to the Scottish Daily Mail that National Records of Scotland’s digital organisation system wasted ‘horrendous’ amounts of time, leaving door-knocking teams facing abuse from residents who felt ‘harassed’.
Teams were sent to knock on doors on the same streets but days apart, with staff dashing around in an ‘illogical’ way.
At FMQs last Wednesday, Nicola Sturgeon boasted that ‘over 1.66 million address visits took place’ as she thanked them for their ‘invaluable support’.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the door-knocker said: ‘The basic problem was that the system was giving us a set number of addresses to visit every day and what we were getting was repeat visits to the same houses over and over again.
‘We weren’t getting new houses that hadn’t been visited.
‘You would be sent to a street, knock on some numbers, and the next day sent back to the same street to different numbers.
‘It was a colossal waste of time and there seemed to be no consistency or co-ordination.
‘I spent more time on the bus than actually knocking on doors and speaking to people.’
He added: ‘Some people also reported suffering abuse – some of it racial – and some were threatened.
‘Other people started to accuse us of harassing them because you were going to the same doors over and over again. There also seemed to be so little publicity that the census was happening, so quite frankly people were not aware.
‘Based on this experience, Scotland would be stupid to attempt to go it alone again.’
Responding to the accusations, an NRS spokesman said: ‘Census field force staff worked extremely hard, making almost 1.7 million visits across Scotland to support people to complete their return and to meet their legal responsibility.
‘Repeat visits were made to give people more than one opportunity to seek help to address any issue that was preventing them from fulfilling their legal responsibility to complete the census.
‘Violence and aggression towards public sector workers is completely unacceptable. Field staff had training and systems to manage risk.’
The first completion data since the May 31 deadline passed showed that 326,368 households (12.5 per cent) failed to fill in the compulsory survey compared to 97 per cent in England, Wales and Northern Ireland when it was carried out there last year.
Using the coronavirus pandemic as justification for the delay, SNP ministers insisted carrying it out at a different time to the rest of the UK would help maximise responses.
As the original deadline approached towards the end of April, SNP Constitution Secretary Angus Robertson announced Scots would have another month to fill in the survey.
The extension cost another £9.76million on top of the £138million previously budgeted for the survey. A second extension was announced on May 31, allowing the return of completed censuses until June 12 if ‘delayed for legitimate reasons’ – although NRS has refused to say how it would be determined.
‘No consistency or co-ordination’