THE DEMISE OF THE TRADITIONAL CENSUS?

Every ten years Britons and UK residents are required to complete a lengthy census form. Issued by the Government, it takes a lot to make the prospect of completing the form appealing.

A suggestion has been made that Google’s vast stores of data could soon help replace the laborious task of manually filing a compulsory questionnaire.

Internet search engines could be used as a source of cheap information on citizen’s lives, interests and movements, according to a government paper.

It could spell the end of the national census, which was first conducted in 1801 and has been carried out every ten years since, apart from during the Second World War.

It aims to cover every home in the country but the last census – the 52-page bulky document in 2011 – missed out three-and-a-half million people. It cost almost half a billion pounds, a price the Treasury considers far too high. But the possibility of abolishing it in favour of information taken in part from controversial internet multinationals risks deep rows over privacy and David Cameron’s ostensibly close links with Google executives.

The company is suffering major damage to its reputation following is slowness to curb inappropriate content and its failure to pay more than minimal taxes in Britain.

There also remain questions over its close links to Mr Cameron, some of his aides, and other ministers (including Labour MPs).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been working out ways of replacing the census with ‘administrative data’ from NHS, tax and benefit records, the electoral register, school and university rolls and other public sources.

But officials are also eager to use information from the private sector. ONS documents have canvassed the idea of tapping into companies with databases each covering more than ten million people.

Firms mentioned include Tesco, the E.ON energy supplier, Thames Water, and Nationwide. The idea of using Google and other search engines to replace the census was raised in a document produced by the Government Statistical Service. Its objective is to look ‘Beyond 2011’, the Whitehall programme for finding an alternative to the traditional census.

Part of the document’s remit is to look at ‘alternative data sources’ which include sources like internet searches or transaction data and information collected and held by commercial organisations.

One example of how this could work is through Google Trends, a publicly-available website which shows the most popular searches broken down by subject and location.

It could be used to find data on migration by, for example, checking the number of searches for jobs in Britain made in Romania.

Google insists it would never sell third party information.