Census 2022 question on religion

The practical reality is that in households the census form is usually filled out by one person and we rely on that person to give accurate answers in relation to everyone in the house. It has been argued previously on this forum that this has in the past resulted in undercounting of no-religionists.

For institutions like hospitals, prisons, boarding schools, etc. there's a "communal form" which the institution manager fills out. It gives the name of everyone in the institution on census night, but no other data about them. The manager is also required to give each person an individual form which they should fill out with their personal data - this is the same data as would be asked about individuals in the household form. The manager should collect these and return them with the communal form.

(I don't know how they cope with, e.g. people who are in intensive care, or otherwise not in a position to fill out a form. Perhaps they ask relatives, or perhaps the hospital registrar completes the individual form as best they can from hospital records, or perhaps they just send back a blank form with a note as to the circumstances, and leave it up to the CSO to chase for data if they wish. The number of people in this situation is probably not statistically significant, and the validity of the census data is not materially impaired by knowing what religious identity, if any, they claim or how long their commute to work is.)

The information on the 1901 and 1911 census forms are very basic compared to the information being gathered by recent census forms and they also contain peoples addresses. It seems that people moved around a lot in urban areas at the time, but that may not be the case for farming communities so their addresses could still be the same after many years.

What some call secrecy others may consider confidential family information and they may not wish it to be shared, whether it is farm sizes, income, religion or anything else that is their own private data.

Like many others, I have looked at the online census and GRO records from time to time. However, that personal data was given in confidence to a government agency and for all we know, the people who provided it all those years ago might be horrified that it is now online for anyone to see, and it was put there by the very government agency who collected it "in confidence".

Also, some families might be upset or annoyed that it is online and they deserve to have their views considered as much as those who want a free for all on personal information.

I would say that most people are happy enough to provide the census data to the CSO for statistical purposes, but as it is personal data, citizens should have the option of having it published online or not, albeit at some future date. Just my opinion.

There is nothing recent about privacy and keeping personal information confidential. The only thing recent is the regulations compelling private companies to keep customer information safe and not disclose it to anyone unauthorised to have it. AFAIK, there was always an onus on public bodies to keep citizens information confidential - don't public servants have to sign up to that?

I know a very elderly lady (youngest of her family) and she was shocked that information about her parents, siblings and the family home is online. Anybody who knows her now would know what her and her kids/grandkids religion is, but she's not happy that her birth family religion is online because she says it's nobody else's business that she changed her religion when she married. TBH, I can see where she's coming from, it might not matter to me or to many others, but it does matter to some families.

Agree her parents might be dead and she is very old, but it is data that she, and her decendants, can be identified from. Does it not matter because she is old?

The "you can't libel the dead" point is an interesting one.

There was a case back in the early twentieth century in which, after the death of British Prime Minister W E Gladstone, an author suggested that that his (well-known, during his life) involvement with attempts to support and reform "fallen women" had been a cover for consorting with prostitutes and, for good measure, that he kept a mistress in a house on Grosvenor Square, and that he had an illegitimate son. His family were hurt and appalled, but seemed to have limited legal recourse because the author couldn't be sued for libel, Gladstone being dead. So his sons went around publicly calling the author a liar, a fraud, etc, and succeeded in getting him expelled from his club, whereupon the author sued them for libel. In the ensuing court action he was unable to produce any evidence that Gladstone had consorted with prostitutes or kept a mistress; "Gladstone's illegitimate son" turned out to be Gladstone's entirely legitimate nephew. The author was torn to shred by the Gladstone sons' lawyers, and he lost the case.

The point is that there was a lot of public sympathy for the Gladstone sons at the time. The author was making fairly scurrilous - and, it turned out, baseless - allegations against a man who wasn't around to defend himself against them, and this was causing foreseeable pain and distress to his family. There was a sense that they should have some way of vindicating their father's reputation. But, if the author hadn't been stupid enough to sue them, they wouldn't have. And it does raise the question of whether my reputation isn't just mine, and if you injure it you don't harm just me.

Having said that, it's a big leap from there to arguing that I should be able to suppress census data that show that my grandmother was born out of wedlock, or my great-grandfather was a brothel-keeper, or whatever. Whatever the arguments about my interest in data that is reasonably current and is personal to someone very close to me, I don't think it can be extended to data that is more than a century old, relates to someone removed from me by a couple of generations, and is mostly innocuous.