01 October 2004
Local government leaders are seeking urgent talks with the Office for National Statistics over fears that its 2003 mid-year population estimates are wrong, Public Finance has learned.
The Local Government Association and the Association of London Government are demanding a meeting with the agency, following complaints from some authorities over the figures released in September.
The councils are warning that they will lose government grant because of reductions in their 2003 population figures. For ministers, this raises the spectre of cuts to local services or big council tax hikes in 2005/06, certain to be a general election year.
The problem appears to centre on the methodology used to estimate migration between authorities. There are fears it does not capture young, mobile population groups that do not use public services.
Sarah Wood, the LGA's director of economic and environmental policy, would not say how many councils had complained, but said the body was obliged to intervene.
'Enough member authorities have now expressed concerns for us to take the matter up formally with the ONS to establish whether their methodology is robust.'
This challenge is highly embarrassing for ONS chief statistician Len Cook, who in July was forced to admit that the 2001 Census figures were wrong, following a protracted dispute.
That fiasco has already thrown the upcoming finance settlement into chaos, because the 2003/04 and 2004/05 settlements must be retrospectively amended. If these latest complaints are upheld, further revisions will be necessary.
Steve Wellings, corporate director for resources at Telford and Wrekin Borough Council, told PF he believed the ONS methodology was flawed. The council's 2003 population figure has increased by just 301 to 160,288.
'We are consistently identified as one of the fastest growing authorities by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. We are building houses at a tremendous rate; we have a fast-growing elderly population. The figure looks very strange.'
The ONS figures show that, nationally, eight of the 20 authorities with the largest apparent falls in population are in London. Steve Lord, director of local government finance at the ALG, said the figures were 'completely counter-intuitive'.
He added: 'Our immediate response is that we just don't believe the figures. All our evidence is that the population is growing.'
PFoct2004
