Angus Robertson, Scotland’s Minister of Constitution, has faced opposition accusations that he had presided over a “catastrophic” process after telling MSP on Thursday that almost a quarter of the owners had not yet made statements, with an initial deadline of three days. As a result, National Records of Scotland, the official data service, had extended the deadline from Sunday 1 May by four weeks to give owners more time to complete returns. Robertson said about 600,000 homes, 23% of the total, had not filed their own since Thursday morning, despite being sent multiple alerts and reminders warning of facing λι 1,000 fines for failing to do so. The ministers also offered the NRS almost επιπλέον 10 million more to cover their additional costs. For the first time, the agency prioritized e-inventory returns, as happened in the rest of the UK last year, with 10% of respondents receiving paper copies on request, Robertson said. About 68,000 people had left incomplete returns online and a similar number had not sent their forms. Clearly disappointed by the high abstention rates, Robertson showed the MSP a thick sheet of different letters and cards that some homes were taking, which he counted as he spoke. He said there were also nearly 1 million home visits by census staff. “There are potentially serious consequences for not completing the census,” he said. “[There] there has been a lot of public information. “The question is why people did not answer in the way one would expect to do.” Donald Cameron, speaking of the Scottish Conservatives, said that low acceptance “was nothing short of disastrous”. It will delay improvements in public services and significantly increase the cost of the inventory, which had already increased by 30 30 million. He said the Scottish Government had been urged by the Tories to conduct a Scottish census at the same time as the rest of the UK, where it was conducted a year ago. That would mean Scotland would have benefited from publicity across the UK that it was taking place, Cameron said. Scottish ministers said the Covid crisis meant a delay was needed. Robertson told Cameron that his government’s position remains. On Monday, NRS revealed that 700,000 homes had not yet submitted returns, and published figures show that return rates were often at their lowest in Scotland’s poorest boroughs. He said Glasgow, the city with the highest rate of digital exclusion in Scotland, had a 65% response rate and Inverclyde, which also has a high poverty rate, had 70%. The richest areas such as Aberdeenshire and East Renfrewshire were over 80%. The UK census had a yield of 97% last year, although the deadline was postponed for some institution arrangements. Data from the National Statistics Office showed that England’s highest digital return rates came from the poorest and most ethnically diverse areas of its councils: Tower Hamlets and Newham in London both had 97% of online responses. NRS confirmed that for the 2011 inventory, which was made on paper and did not involve any extension, the rate of return was 94% and in 2001 it was 96%. In 2011, only three people were charged for not filing.
