§ Mr. GerrardTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps are being taken to ensure that the release of detailed data for the 1991 census occurs as speedily as possible.
§ Mr. SackvilleIn my reply to my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Wight (Mr. Field) on 8 May at col9, I stated that release of the first computer-processed census results was under way, in the form of publication of the first county monitor. County monitors contain summary statistics for all local authority districts on all the census topics which were fully processed and will be published county by county, as the data processing is completed.
In a reply to the then Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Brandon-Bravo) on 5 March at columns 272–73, my hon. Friend the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State described a major problem which had arisen in processing the answers to the question on the 1991 census form on the term-time address of students. He explained that this had caused some delay to the publication of census results, and gave an outline provisional timetable for publication of the first tranche of results.
Every effort is being made to publish all county monitors by the end of September 1992, and to produce and publish the rest of the first tranche of census outputs to the timetable given in issue 19 of the "Census Newsletter", a copy of which is available in the Library. Further details of the census output timetable will be published in future editions of the "Census Newsletter" as soon as they are sufficiently firm.
Priority is being given to providing those census figures, including statistics required for re-basing the Registrar General's annual mid-year estimates, needed for use in the calculations of 1993–94 resource allocations to local and health authorities.