Adding a Sikh ethnic tick box to UK census would cost over Rs 2,000 crore and delay census by full year, court hears

LONDON: If the census order approved by the UK Parliament is “quashed” and redesigned with a Sikh ethnic tick-box, it will delay the entire census being carried out by a full year and cost a quarter of a billion pounds (Rs 2,411 crore), amounting to an “astonishing waste of public funds”, the Cabinet Office has told the high court here.
The England and Wales census is scheduled to take place in March 2021.
Jonathan Auburn, barrister for the Cabinet Office, told the administrative court of the high court on Wednesday that commercial contracts had been entered into, 200 staff employed and three million forms printed, so quashing the order would “give rise to massive costs and a massive waste of public funds”.
He said the delay would not only damage the integrity of statistics, but also have detrimental consequences to the whole realm of public sector decision-making and funding allocations, ranging from health, to migration and employment. “There has never been a case before you to show such a level of detriment to public administration,” he said.
The Sikh Federation (UK), with the backing of more than 150 gurdwaras and Sikh organisations, has brought a judicial review against the Cabinet Office challenging the lack of a specific Sikh tick-box in the response section of the ethnicity section of the 2021 census. The federation claims ethnic data on Sikhs needs to be recorded to assist public bodies with planning services and claims not all Sikhs identify as Sikh by religion.
Mr Justice Choudhury, presiding over the hearing, said he would hand down judgment in a few weeks’ time.
“The census won’t prevent anyone from identifying themselves as ethnically Sikh as the Sikh response can be written in,” Auburn argued. “The huge detriment to delaying the census dwarfs the very limited issued raised by this claimant now. We feel it is crucial the census is held in March 2021. There will be very serious consequences if it is set back.”
He described some of the Sikh Federation (UK)’s claims as “mischievous and misleading” and described their legal challenge as “frankly ridiculous” and “bizarre”.
He denied claims that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) had secretly changed its evaluation tools in a radical way on the “test” for ethnic tick boxes between 2011 and 2019, and said the changes were “minor.” He also denied that the findings of focus groups had been “pivotal” to the decision not to include a Sikh ethnic tick-box in the census, saying the ONS did take into account a survey of 112 gurdwaras which found support for a tick box. “We did not think it was useful statistically but we didn’t ignore it,” he said,
“The federation has been heavily involved for the past 10 years in seeking to pressure the ONS to have a Sikh tick-box,” Auburn told the court, adding, “Being Sikh is a rather more nuanced or tricky identity than being Ukrainian. People will ask, ‘Am I Sikh, Indian, or Asian?’”
He said whilst some British Sikhs identified as Asian or Indian, some saw themselves as Punjabi, not Indian, whilst younger Sikhs were more concerned about being British. “If having the tick-box affects the data quality, where is the unlawfulness?”