2021 Census

The Census is due on the 21st of March but you may already have received your notification.

If you know your household situation will still have the same people under the roof on that night you can fill in the form beforehand. I've already done ours - and told them, in the feedback section, where I think they hadn't got things right.

There are some sections that say that you don't need to answer and you just need to click on the 'Continue' button. Some of the other things also don't need to be completed - but don't say so! If you don't want to answer something don't do it and click on 'Continue'. If it lets you get away with it then you're OK. Otherwise it will say you need to complete it.

I tried not filling it in on every page and it let me go past on about three of them that didn't say that you don't need to fill it in.

On one part I just said 'see previous question' - where the answers overlapped.

 

It states quite clearly that you can fill it in as soon as you wish if you don't expect your situation to change. You can always go back in and change anything if it happens between now and then - only 12 days.

We have no intention of putting someone up for the night (it's actually against the restrictions) and we have not had anyone inside our house for a year or put someone up for years. If our place became uninhabitable or one, or both, of us went into hospital I don't think we would actually care about the census. The information in it would all still be the same except for where we would happen to be on that night. The information collected is for statistics and the residence on that night is simply to try and make sure people don't fill it in twice.

I find some of the questions an irrelevance (they address me as Mr so I'm wondering what sex I am!) and others not described sufficiently. Both Mrs Shiney and I have lots of qualifications but how some of them relate to things like NVQ4 and 5 is an unknown. Even within the NVQ's there can be certain omissions e.g. I used to be an Assessor and a Verifier for NVQ's. This entailed deciding whether people had qualified for their NVQ levels but I didn't have NVQ's. Not that one person's confusion makes much difference to the overall statistics.

Having worked with the census board and also with the Office of National Statistics I know that the longer a person has a piece of paper with their census access code hanging around, the more likely they are to misplace it.

 

@NigelJ for a suitable fee I could probably arrange it for you

 

If I worried about things like that I would certainly get depressed and never leave the house.

Life is for living and, at the moment, the garden is calling. I'm not going to worry about whether I may stab my foot with the fork but shall do my best not to. I've managed to avoid doing so since WWII

 

I've already filled in ours online.

In theory, yes. During the 1991 census people (census collectors) came knocking on your door if you hadn't done it. I'm not sure what they would do if you didn't. I suppose it's possible they may take you off the electors' register but do you care?