 So the kind of census data kind of underpins a majority of the most important research in this country. It does. I guess another example and indicating how the census, even though the recent data we've got, the most recent data we've got are quite old now. They're still in many ways the best data we've got. Very few other resources give us at a really spatially detailed national scale. Breakdowns of the number of people in different ethnic groups. And we know from COVID-19 that different ethnic groups have experienced infections from COVID-19 and deaths at differing rates. But only really the census can give us a really spatially detailed picture of where people in different ethnic groups are living. And so I guess there was a new census coming up. What do you look forward to with this data that's going to be taken on this census and how could it immediately have an impact on changing what we do in society? Well, obviously we're really excited about the 2021 census, which is, as we record, about to take place. We're really excited to see how well it goes. One of its big innovations is that it's predominantly being carried out online. So people can complete their census on their laptop, on a tablet, on their phone, any kind of device they want to use. One of the big strengths of that is it's going to give us the data more quickly than has been possible in the past. And we're really interested in looking at the social patterns that that data is going to show us. So for example, when we looked at the 2011 census, one of the things that became very apparent in it was in some places, especially in London, the growth of private renting. And we're interested in seeing how that's panned out when we look at it, when we look at it in a specially detailed way across the whole country. What has the last 10 years been like? We're also vitally interested in what exactly the picture of the country is at the moment. We know this is an extraordinary time for the country for a number of reasons, both because of COVID-19. People have lost their jobs. People have changed the way that they work. People are on furlough. People have moved around the country to be in bubbles with other family members and so on. And at the same time, we've got changes in the economy due to Brexit. So having a snapshot of the nation at the moment is going to be absolutely fascinating. We don't know how it's going to go over the next few years, but having to know about the nation at the moment is really vital for understanding what the next few years are going to present us with and how we can steer ourselves through the next few years. So you think the data from this census will help quite in a big way with dealing with the problems caused by the pandemic and also much more beyond that in terms of our future. So in a way, it's not just looking at epidemics, it's looking at how we're going to recover and incorporate it into our future over the next few years, 10 years or so. Yeah, there's obviously a huge number of questions that face us about recovering from the pandemic and how we rebuild all sorts of sectors that have been massively affected by successive lockdowns and inability to reopen at all over the period. So the census will tell us something about how the economy has changed, how people's occupations have changed. This will help us to understand what happened over the year of the pandemic and the extent of the task we face in both rebuilding our economy and building back better, building back differently. One example of that that we can think about are journeys to work. See, lots of people have changed the way that they work. Lots of people are working at home, lots of people have changed their jobs. At the same time, a lot of people have shied away from using public transport for various reasons. They don't want to be on a crowded tube, for example. So people have changed the way they commute to use other methods, walking or cycling to work if they live near work. But at the same time, other people have shifted to using their car to get to work when they might have used public transport earlier. It's really going to be really important for us to know the extent to which that has happened in both ways. That has really important implications for provision of public transport and other sorts of transport infrastructure. But it's also really important for understanding our impact on the environment and our wish to become a less carbon focused economy. One of the things that's happened in this round of the census, of course, is that Scotland have moved their census to 2022. And one of the things we're going to be able to do, looking at that, that will present its own issues in analysis of data. But one of the things we'll be able to do is compare England and Wales in 2021 when hopefully the pandemic is receding. Hopefully future waves won't be as bad. We'll be able to compare that with Scotland in 2022, which hopefully will have had a year of recovering when it comes to taking their census. So we'll be able to look at Scotland and say, OK, how has Scotland changed in that year since the census was conducted in England and Wales and Northern Ireland? So do you think this census could be one of the most important ones for quite some time? And then how far back would you go in terms of the importance that it has on our society? I think this is absolutely the most important census we've had in a very long time. And I don't really know when you could go back to, I mean, maybe sort of 1921 and a country that was coming out of the First World War and the 1918 flu epidemic. Or you could look to the 1951 census after World War II, although obviously in that case there'd been six years of change in the country. The census in 2021 is right in the middle of what's going on. I think it's going to provide hugely interesting data to social science researchers and to policy analysts now. But as we look towards the future as well, historians will find it fascinating and really useful that we held a census in the middle of our pandemic. And it's a significance of having lots of census in 2022 compared to the census in the rest of the UK this year. It's quite an important kind of way to measure the difference. In that time, it gives you a chance to measure the difference, kind of the muscetology in recovery. Yeah, I think we can try and look for the silver linings that we can find in things that happen in everyday life. And clearly the Scottish census being in 2022 poses a number of problems for interpretation of the data and analysis of the data, especially for things like cross-border flows and so on. And we know that there are the people that won't be counted in either census because they've moved from Scotland to England or Wales or Northern Ireland. But conversely, there'll be people that are counted in both censuses because they've moved to Scotland in that year, that year. So there's going to be interesting effects in the data. In terms of analysis, they're not going to affect analysis particularly badly, I think, unless you're specifically interested in sort of the Scottish borders region and people moving across that border for work and so on. If you are, that analysis is going to be difficult. But I think that this natural experiment that having the census in Scotland in 2022 will give us of having a census in the same country offset by a year. And we can see if we assume Scotland's state at the moment is pretty similar to the rest of the UK in terms of the economy. We'll have a year's difference to see how Scotland has recovered from it. How have people gone back to working in the jobs that they used to? Have they gone to different jobs? The way that they move the proximity to work, all those sorts of things, we'll be able to get some sense of has that changed in a year? In a way that suggests there might be some sort of long term change in the way people think about the way they live and work. So it could provide some strong evidence to help us as people adapt to the new world we're going to enter and also help government policy kind of help us to adapt as well successfully. Yeah, absolutely. And government policy that's developed in an absence of data. However well meaning and however well thought out it might be is always going to suffer from not being fully informed. The more we can inform government policy with decent data, then the better that policy has the potential to be.