Will Scotland’s census extension ruin the results?

The debacle over Scotland’s census will not, it seems, have a happy ending. Nearly a quarter of households (some 604,000) are yet to complete their return, and had been facing £1,000 fines from today. It could have been a prosecution of unprecedented scale, but the deadline has been extended to the end of May. Sir Tom Devine, perhaps Scotland’s best-known historian, has said he thinks all is lost. ‘Such is the scale of the disaster the authorities have had little choice but to offer a new deadline,’ he said. ‘Will the extension work? It is very doubtful.’ The SNP has not admitted to any fault, but instead blamed (you guessed it) the media, ‘anxiety’ caused by ‘recent world events’, the cost of living crisis and Covid. All of these things faced the English, who returned the census at a rate of 97 per cent. In Scotland, it’s 77 per cent.

It’s hard to govern a country if you’re not sure who’s in it, what they do and how they live – which is why countries large and small put so much work into their census.