Census (England and Wales) Order 2020

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, both here and in the Commons, there have been some powerful speeches on the inclusion of questions on Cornish identity and Sikh ethnicity, so I need do no more than express my sympathy and support for the cases that have been made. We are moving towards a country of complex and multiple identities, not easily represented by our two-party and first-past-the-post system—but that is an issue for a different debate. I mark in passing that a strong sense of Yorkshire identity is entirely absent from the questionnaire. We face a Conservative Government who resist any recognition of Yorkshire identity in how they approach devolution in Yorkshire, which is to city regions rather than to Yorkshire as a whole, as all our local authorities have stressed.

We are a much more complex society. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, remarked, our local authorities often know this about languages and ethnic groups in much more detail than do our national Government. That leads me on to the relationship between local and national data. I am struck by how the Government have approached the pandemic by neglecting the skills and resources of our local authorities, going to outside private contractors for testing and other things rather than reinforcing the strengths of our local authorities.

The Minister said in opening that we should make greater use of data already held by government. A great deal of very useful data is held by our local authorities. As we consider the future of the census, we need to take further the question of how we feed in and out of different government agencies the data which they hold separately, and the safeguards that data mining and data analysis need therefore to have.

There is of course the difficult question, which we will come back to later, of why electoral registration is held separately from other forms of establishing where our citizens live and who they are. Every British citizen and long-term resident should be on the electoral register.

I welcome the statement in the Conservative manifesto last year that:

“We will improve the use of data, data science and evidence in the process of government.”


That is a highly desirable idea, although reading Dominic Cummings’s blog over the years and looking at the antics of what one has to call the Warner brothers, Ben and Marc—one of them in No. 10 and the other working for an outside company which has apparently some very privileged relationships with the Government—I think that we clearly need greater transparency as to what exactly is going on within government as we move through the digital transformation.

I thank the Minister for offering me the opportunity to talk to the Office for National Statistics on my own. However, it would be much more valuable to use the real expertise on the digital transformation that there is on all Benches in the House, and invite us for a number of briefings on how the Government plan to expand and improve their use of data, how the future census may or may not fit in with that, and how they will build in the safeguards which we will need. To comment on what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, said, the question of data transparency as well of data ownership is an important part of that. I note that in Sweden, for example, the degree of transparency on tax returns is a great deal higher than in Britain, which apparently has a markedly positive effect on not paying some people too much money.

The Minister also talked about the need to maintain the security and secrecy of people’s personal data. That is highly desirable—we certainly need to improve the safeguards on that—but citizens sometimes need to demonstrate to government their entitlement, presence and records. The Windrush scandal, for example, was entirely unnecessary. All those people had, within other agencies of government, records that they had been living in Britain for some time: their tax returns, national insurance records, and in many cases their driving licence. The Home Office did not attempt to look at the metadata to establish whether there were records for those people before it attempted to deport many of them. That is another major issue to which we need to return.

We certainly wish to look at the wider issues here. We were promised last year that the Government would publish a White Paper on their data strategy before the end of 2020. I understand that this has now slipped several months behind schedule because officials have been detached to deal first with the threat of a no-deal Brexit and now with the coronavirus pandemic. This offers opportunities in digital transformation for improving the quality of government policy but also risks individual privacy and liberty. Can the Minister assure us that the Government will do their utmost to carry Parliament and the public with them as they move forward, and that regular briefings for parliamentarians on what is planned and whether a further census should be held in 2031 should be part of building and maintaining public trust?

Beyond this, I simply add that the quality of the data the census provides will depend on how well it manages to record marginal communities and individuals: recent migrants, the homeless, and elderly people living alone. I hope that the Minister will also assure us that the Government will target resources on such groups, who are the least likely to know how to go online or voluntarily and patiently to fill in a long and complicated form on their own.