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Old January 23rd 05, 07:09 PM posted to uk.transport.london
Martin Underwood Martin Underwood is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Nov 2003
Posts: 221
Default Missing men (was London population not increasing)

"Michael Bell" wrote in message
...
In article , Nick Cooper
wrote:

Thank you for your last post. Very informative. You seem to be well up on
population and census matters. Let me ask you another.

If you have a good system of registering births and deaths, then
strictly speaking, you don't need a census. All the births are registered,
and so are the deaths, with the year of birth of the deceased. So your
number
in each age group is simply the number born in that period less the number
died. Every time a census is done, the count got is compared to the number
calculated as above, and up to the 1991 census, the comparison was
reasonable.

But in the 1991 census, there was a shortfall of 700 000, mostly
men,
and almost all 16 - 32 years old. The official explanation was that they
were
in hiding from the poll tax, then only recently abolished. But even then,
there was a school of thought which said that this was cowardice and we
should face up to the fact that they had gone abroad.

The same was repeated in the 2001 census, only now the numbers have
gone up, because this phenonomenon has been going on longer, and it now
extends to older people.

What can the explanation be? The can't be dead - somebody would have
noticed over a million bodies. Some local authorities claim that it is
multiple occupation in student houses - but didn't this happen before and
some of these men are now a bit old for that kind of thing. Or, as some
claim, have they gone abroad?

What is the current thinking on this?


What an interesting question. I wonder what could have happened since 1991
that could explain such a discrepancy that wasn't there in previous
censuses. The poll tax explanation could explain the 1991 shortfall but what
incentive would there be in 2001 to avoid the census?

I presume the comparisons are made between births/deaths in the UK and
people in the census who say they were born in the UK, so as to avoid
counting immigrants. So on the face of it, it's a fair comparison.

I've forgotten: how much information is requested in the modern census? I
answered all the questions on mine without really remembering what they were
asking. Do they ask for place of origin? Do they ask for national insurance
number? For that matter, are NI numbers allocated at birth and recorded on
the birth certificate, or are they only allocated when people start working?
In theory, given access to all the information (Data Protection Act
permitting!) it would be possible to correlate names in the birth/death
registers against names in the census: you may not know *which* John Smiths
are missing, but you can identify how many you'd expect for each year of
birth, subtracting those of each year of birth who have died (birth
year=death year - age at death) and correlate that against name and age on
census.

When people emigrate (if that is the explanation for the shortfall) is there
any official record of that fact? If the number of UK citizens who emigrated
correlates with the shortfall, that looks a plausible explanation.

I find it difficult to imagine hiding from official lists because I'm so
bloody honest that I regard it as my duty to stand up and be counted and
recorded for posterity - and genealogists! But I'm well aware that there are
a lot of people who don't think this way.