Census day

[vix]

Same, job - lecturer in bookkeeping and accounts, description - errr well.....

[Will]

Originally Posted by Takhisis

The heating one could be seen to work out where to put funding; no need to put loads into electric if 80% of people have gas.
As for the work one I just put admin as both the job title and job description

They can tell that from the gas/electricity suppliers though.

I mean how many people have only coal/wood fired central heating?!?! And why does it matter how many bathrooms/toilets you have or how many rooms you have in your home?

What I'm getting at is a lot of these questions don't really help advise anything that they don't already know.

[volospian]

Originally Posted by Will

They can tell that from the gas/electricity suppliers though.

I mean how many people have only coal/wood fired central heating?!?! And why does it matter how many bathrooms/toilets you have or how many rooms you have in your home?

What I'm getting at is a lot of these questions don't really help advise anything that they don't already know.

Will, you seem to be under the assumption that various government bodies actually share data with each other. Sadly this is about as common as rocking horse manure.

There are some link ups in data locally, and there are a few systems that are linked nationally, such as the Locta database, but the idea that data is available across the country, to whichever government body that wants it, is not really correct.

It's true that the data is collected by various agencies, and it's theoretically true that the ONS could get access to that data, but the practicality of making those data sources talk to each other, and to maintain integrity while mining that data (i.e. knowing that John Smith on the Benefits database is the same John Smith on the Gas Supplier database and the same John Smith on the Births and Deaths register, for example) would be technically difficult and extremely costly.

It's simply cheaper to ask everybody for the same information again.

[Kitten]

Originally Posted by Belmit

I love how, on the whole, the description of most people's job is already in their title e.g.

Job: Software Manager
Description: Managing Software/Team

You only get about 20-30 characters worth of space so not much more you can do!

haha, Leo put 'Software Developer' or similar and said 'What shall I put for the description. I said 'Developing Software'.

Same was mine - Code & Release Management - Managing & Releasing code.

[Will]

Originally Posted by volospian

Will, you seem to be under the assumption that various government bodies actually share data with each other. Sadly this is about as common as rocking horse manure.

There are some link ups in data locally, and there are a few systems that are linked nationally, such as the Locta database, but the idea that data is available across the country, to whichever government body that wants it, is not really correct.

It's true that the data is collected by various agencies, and it's theoretically true that the ONS could get access to that data, but the practicality of making those data sources talk to each other, and to maintain integrity while mining that data (i.e. knowing that John Smith on the Benefits database is the same John Smith on the Gas Supplier database and the same John Smith on the Births and Deaths register, for example) would be technically difficult and extremely costly.

It's simply cheaper to ask everybody for the same information again.

Seems absolutely daft and a huge waste of money!

[Mark]

Originally Posted by Will

The thing is they have most of the details from our HMRC, Council Tax bills, Vote register, and so on.

HMRC is no guarantee for people who can't work, council tax tells you nothing about who lives in the household, electoral roll is no good for people who don't vote, and so on. There is no other system on which everyone must appear by law, so there simply is no other way.

Why they need to know what sort of central heating I've got, and who I had round on the 27th I know not...

Energy policy. Heating is the biggest single item on the vast majority of household energy bills.

I don't get what all the fuss is about. The law says you must complete it it doesn't say they're going to park up outside your front door and count how many days you're not there - nor haul you off to jail for staying one day longer than you said. If you don't want to tell them something then don't.

[semi-pro waster]

Originally Posted by Will

They can tell that from the gas/electricity suppliers though.

I mean how many people have only coal/wood fired central heating?!?! And why does it matter how many bathrooms/toilets you have or how many rooms you have in your home?

What I'm getting at is a lot of these questions don't really help advise anything that they don't already know.

Some of the questions are there more for historical purposes to track trends than because of the necessity for guiding future policy. Say a question about whether you have an indoor water closet - the number of people in the UK who would answer in the negative is almost certainly vanishingly small but it's potentially still interesting for statistical purposes to show how this has changed over time.

Some as Mark says won't reveal answers any other way, we could guess but why do that when you can hopefully get the correct information.

Originally Posted by Will

Seems absolutely daft and a huge waste of money!

While much of the information is held across a variety of sources there's a few issues to sharing it including (but not exclusively) that it's difficult to get all the systems to talk to each other, data integrity and security is certainly more difficult to maintain when you're combining systems that were never intended for it, matching data against incomplete records (either because the information was never requested, someone didn't fill in the data correctly or because they've moved house/changed name/got married/whatever) is difficult if you want to get anything reliable out of it. Then of course there's potentially issues with the DPA since most of us won't have consented to our gas supplier sharing the information with others in any way that could possibly identify us - use any service you like as an example but most will at the very least have an opt out about sharing data which I almost habitually select even without thinking. It's one of those "damned if you do..." situations - if the collation of data was done by getting all government records systems and service supplier systems to talk to each other (assuming it could be done and the information was there) then it's Big Brother and unacceptable intrusion into their lives for a large percentage of the population, if they don't do this then it's a waste of time for the people who don't care about such a conflation of their personal data.

In essence it's simpler for both practical and political reasons as well as more likely to get a useful set of data requesting it fresh from every household than trying to cobble together information from a variety of data sources.

If it helps then try dividing the time you've spent on completing the census by the number of years until you get asked again - I work it out to be maybe 3 minutes a year?

[Will]

Oh I answered it ubt my answers were as vague and cryptic as possible - and ticked the n/a or similar option as many times as possible.