31 October 2003
Westminster council has called on Chancellor Gordon Brown to intervene in its dispute with the Office for National Statistics after its watchdog cast doubt on the 2001 Census results.
Deputy leader Kit Malthouse has written to Brown following a report by the Statistics Commission, which questions the reliability of the population count for the central London borough.
Commission chair David Rhind concluded: 'In simple terms, there is too much uncertainty about the final results in the most hard-to-count areas.'
Now Westminster wants Brown to step in to the row, which has been dragging on for over a year, and revise its population figure upwards.
'The weight of evidence is now too great for the situation to continue,' Malthouse wrote. 'We have reached a situation where the city council can not and should not waste further public money proving its case.'
Malthouse told Public Finance that the chancellor should act before the provisional finance settlement for 2004/05 is published later this year.
Population statistics play a crucial role in determining the level of grant for each authority.
'Privately, ministers have admitted they think the figure is rubbish, their own statistics watchdog says its rubbish, how much more do we have to do?' Malthouse asked.
He warned that the council would take legal action if the government used the existing figures to calculate next year's grant allocation. 'They should not use the ONS's current figure, they should assume a discretionary figure for use in the finance settlement.We will challenge the settlement in the courts if we have to,' he said.
The long-running wrangle was prompted after the census 'lost' 64,000 residents, putting Westminster's population for 2001 at 181,000, down from the ONS's 2000 figure of 245,000.
The two bodies are running a data-matching exercise to compare the addresses they hold on their databases, which is due to finish by the end of the year.
Manchester City Council has also disputed its census result and is going through a similar exercise.
But an ONS spokesman told PF that, despite the commission's conclusions, it stood by its original census count.
'We have committed ourselves to a special additional study, which will either give Westminster more confidence in the results or give us an assessment of any population missing,' he said.
PFoct2003
