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The response to Census 2021 has exceeded all expectations, with 97 per cent of households across England and Wales making sure they count when it comes to local services like school places, GP surgeries and hospital beds.
Continue reading this press release from Tuesday 4 May in the links below:
English press release
Welsh press release
During the census, you may have become aware of a number of online phishing scams attempting to defraud the public.
Now that Census Day has passed, scammers are taking the opportunity to take advantage of the potential fine imposed onto non-compliant members of the public. This has resulted in an array of phishing sites going live. They mimic the look and layout of the official Census website but demand a payment due to ‘late fees’ or ‘incorrect information’. They ask for card and bank details giving them full access to take a victim’s funds.
All of the scams so far appear to have been distributed through SMS messages which provide a malicious URL link to send the victim to the phishing site, citing that they need to pay a fee for late or incorrect completion of the census and they must fill in the scammers form to rectify this. In doing so they are giving away their personal and financial information.
 Once scam campaigns have been identified by our teams, we contact hosting companies to initiate takedown proceedings. This includes having them removed from the web and marked as a malicious site on web browsers to prevent anyone from visiting the site. Once discovered, the average time for a takedown to complete is one hour, with the site becoming completely inaccessible within 3 hours. To date we’ve had 60 census scam sites removed from the internet, potentially preventing hundreds of individual fraud cases.
To raise public awareness around these scams, we worked with City of London Police to publish an Action Fraud article. This contained important information on how to spot scams and, if you have been the victim of one, how to report it to the appropriate organisations.
If you notice any suspicious sites or become aware of scams, please get in touch with us at 2021Census.LA.Liaison@ons.gov.uk.
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A Year 7 pupil from Kent has won £1,000 for their school and the chance to meet Gogglebox star Tom Malone as part of the Census Secondary Education Programme competition.
Ariadne Young, from St Anselm’s Catholic School in Canterbury, received the top prize in the ‘It’s Our Story’ competition for 11 to 18-year-olds to create a campaign motivating their local community to take part in Census 2021.
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Young people from more than 2,000 schools and colleges across England and Wales were asked to design a campaign to raise awareness about the once-in-a-decade survey among a specific audience via YouTube videos, leaflets, online articles or social media posts.
For her winning effort, Ariadne created a YouTube video using her ventriloquism skills to explain why everyone should complete the census.
Alongside £1,000 in IT equipment vouchers for the school, Ariadne has also won a Q and A session with Gogglebox star and TikTok celebrity Tom Malone, an ambassador for the Census Secondary Education Programme, and the chance for the winning entry to be captured as a matter of historic public record by The National Archives in the UK Government Web Archive.
Runners up have been chosen and will also have their work captured in the UK Government Web Archive. They are teams of students from:
St Anselm’s Catholic School, Canterbury
Latymer Upper School, London
Guiseley School, Leeds
Manchester High School for Girls, Manchester
Bishop Hedley High School, Merthyr Tydfil
Portsmouth High School, Portsmouth
Tewkesbury School, Tewkesbury
Entrants were judged by a panel of experts including Teacher Tapp co-founder and education journalist, Laura McInerney, head of education & outreach at The National Archives, Andrew Payne, ONS deputy director of Communications Karen Campbell-White, EVERFI UK president Nick Fuller MBE and managing director at M&C Saatchi, Tom Firth.
Watch the winning entry and find out about the runners up on the Census Secondary Education website.
Winners of the primary school competition will be announced in June.
- Issue Twenty - 19 March – Follow-up visits, scam guidance, second homes
- Issue Twenty one - 26 March – RAG response maps, social media calendar, scam guidance
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Issue Twenty two - 1 April – RAG maps, scams, COVID-19 tests for field officers
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Issue Twenty three - 13 April – HRH Duke of Edinburgh, 2nd RAG maps, Action Fraud, Messages for LAs to give the public
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Issue Twenty four - 16 April – HRH Duke of Edinburgh, 3rd RAG maps, data and security
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Issue Twenty five - 23 April – Census 2021 outputs, Census Coverage Survey, social media resources
- Issue Twenty six - 30 April – What happens next, CCS, Non-compliance, QA, Students
Census 2021 Website: www.census.gov.uk
Quality Assurance: ONS’s approach and processes for assuring the quality of 2021 Census data
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