12 September 2003
The saga of Westminster's missing residents may now be resolved as preliminary results from an investigation have shown the 2001 census may have missed 25,000 households.
A study jointly commissioned by the local authority and the Office for National Statistics has revealed a huge discrepancy between the number of addresses each organisation holds on its database.
Westminster's list, at 127,000, is 25% bigger than the ONS's 102,000. These figures are provisional and when the findings are officially published next week the gap may have narrowed, but it is certain there will still be a substantial variation.
The study is said to identify housing estates and properties split into flats as representing many missed households.
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.
Kit Malthouse, Westminster's deputy leader, said the findings were 'independent hard evidence' that the census was flawed, and called on the ONS to 'correct their mistake' in time for this year's finance settlement.
'We now know that the ONS records did not include thousands of our households.
We still don't know how many of the homes that they did know about returned a census form and were included in the final count,' he said.
A spokeswoman for the ONS said: 'Until the data matching exercise is completed it would be premature to speculate on it.'
A sample of Westminster's extra households will now be analysed by representatives of the ONS and the authority to establish that they exist. It is due to finish by December.
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