WRITTEN ON February 27th, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy, Save Time and Money

I dont get this.

The 2011 Census will adopt a similar processing strategy to that used in the 2001 Census.

But this is a £500m deal. And it’s 10 years on. Shouldn’t things have changed more than this?

The Times reported

The ONS has already formed a working group to investigate alternatives to the census. It will present it recommendations to the government after the 2011 survey.

“We’ve started thinking, ‘Okay, what comes beyond 2011?’” said Peter Benton, deputy director of the census at the ONS. “We’ve set up a programme to look at our need for information and the different ways we could meet that need in future.”

What do we do here? Does a bankrupt country want to spend £500m a time on a C19th process? How many Jedi will get recorded, as public trust in government data handling plummets?

But we need the data as much as ever; we need to build and improve the consistent data set, and we probably need more data now and in future rather than less. We need a census for the #PBAge.

ONS says it’s going to look at the sort of stuff that Finland has been doing for a decade. But have they looked at where the future is headed with VRM and volunteered personal information? What chance their supplier Lockheed Martin has been offering “thought leadership” on techniques that would slash the cost of the process (do they care if it were way more effedctive, and privacy-friendly?)

Perhaps when ONS feel sufficiently on top of the 2011 census, they’ll take a moment to look at this sort of stuff.