The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Karen Dunnell, dated May 2009:
As National Statistician I have been asked to reply to your recent question asking what budget has been allocated to the generation of outputs from the 2011 Census. (274196)
The purpose of conducting a Census is to generate statistics and over the period 2005-2016 the budget for the Census as a whole is £482 million. Provision of £450 million for the cost of the Census has been made up to the period 2011-12. Of this £450 million, £7.5 million has been allocated to the early development of Census outputs. Provision for later years from 2012/13 will be subject to future spending reviews and will cover the final stages of data and output processing, preparing, publishing and disseminating outputs, and a number of subsequent output services and releases. This is set out in paragraphs 1.28 and 1.29 of the 2011 Census White Paper ‘Helping to shape tomorrow’ which was published in December 2008. A copy was placed in the House of Commons library and is also available on the website at
http://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2011-census/2011-census-project/legislation/index.html
Final decisions have not yet been made about how the statistics are disseminated. We are at present conducting consultation with census users on their requirements for types of statistics and area levels and the ways in which they will be made available.