SNP ditches census deadline as Scots fail to respond
Results could be rendered useless as a quarter are yet to reply, despite 12-month delay ‘to boost uptake’
SNP ministers are set to abandon their deadline for the Scottish census, after low response rates left the £138million survey on the brink of disaster. The
Daily Telegraph understands that Angus Robertson, the Constitution Secretary with ultimate responsibility for the census, will tell MSPS at Holyrood today that there will be a four-week extension to Sunday’s deadline for forms to be completed.
The climbdown will add further weight to claims that a decision to delay the census by a year, which was blamed on Covid and cost taxpayers £21.6million, had been a major blunder.
It was claimed at the time that a 12-month postponement would “ensure the highest possible response rate”. However, as of last weekend, just 74 per cent of forms in Scotland had been returned, with no information submitted by 700,000 households.
In the rest of the UK, where the census went ahead as planned last year, the exercise was a success, with 97 per cent of households responding.
Experts said the low response rate would mean the census results, essential for allocating public funding, would be rendered “useless”. However, the unprecedented decision to overhaul the survey once it had already begun could also see the quality of data compromised, academics said.
Carrying out the survey at the same time of year as previous decades had previously been put forward by National Records of Scotland, which runs the census, as important to ensure consistency and comparability of data.
“Extending the window for responding raises worrying questions about data quality,” Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh, said. “As a social statistician, I would not use census data on identity that had such an arbitrarily varying window of replying.”
Some respondents have complained that questions have a political bias. For example, respondents are able to record themselves as Scottish, Polish or Irish, but not English. There has also been controversy over guidance informing people they can choose whether they are male or female based on their gender identity, rather than biological sex.
Donald Cameron, the senior Scottish Tory MSP, said an extension would amount to an admission from the SNP that it had made a shambles of the census. “The census is vital for determining the allocation of Scottish Government resources, so this lamentable failure has very serious implications,” Mr Cameron said.
A spokesman for National Records of Scotland said: “Our focus continues to be on supporting and enabling remaining households to complete their census return by the start of May, adding to the over two million households across Scotland that have already done so.”