Every 10 years, major crises notwithstanding, the UK government organises a national census. The last was in 2011 and the next is scheduled for 21st March 2021. But the next census won't be exactly the same as the last, so there are all sorts of things to test before the whole thing goes live with the entire population. Four diverse areas of Britain are being used at testbeds for a Census Rehearsal which is taking place between now and mid-November. One is Carlisle, another is Ceredigion in Wales, and the others are both in east London - Hackney and Tower Hamlets. Which is why I got an invitation in the post to take part, and why I've just completed the new census form eighteen months ahead of you.
The first big thing about Census 2021 is that it'll be digital first. You will be able to complete it on paper but they'd prefer you didn't, mainly because it saves money and speeds up the efficient collection of data. Last time less than 20% of households received a form but chose to complete the census online. The target for 2021 is that 75% of households complete online. That's why all the nudging on my census rehearsal form is towards the website, not the phone number for requesting a paper questionnaire. A private organisation has been contracted to provide Census Online Support Centres in the community for the digitally-excluded who need help completing the form online. Good luck with that.
I entered my 16-character access code, as requested, and completed my form online. The opening screen reassured me that my data would be kept confidential, but I wonder how many people will be put off by fears over digital privacy. It all looks quite smartphone-friendly, which is a measure of the strides our online lives have taken since 2011. The algorithm asked me to confirm where I lived and to enter details of all the people who'd be here on the chosen date, which is Sunday 13th October. I could already see that completing the form online was going to be simpler than filling it in on paper, with all the "Now go to question 9" branching safely hidden within the programming.
Section 1 is People who live here, Section 2 is Household accommodation and Section 3 is Personal information. Section 3 takes by far the longest to fill in. It's also where the new questions are, and these new questions are another reason why the government has been so keen to hold a census rehearsal.
• Veteran status: whether the respondent has ever served in the UK Armed Forces.
• Sexual orientation: whether the respondent identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, or some other sexual orientation. This question will be voluntary and only asked of respondents aged 16 and over.
• Gender identity: whether the respondent’s gender is different from the sex they were registered as at birth. This question will also be voluntary and limited to respondents aged 16 and over.
The Armed Forces question is because "there is a need from central government, local authorities and charities for better data to monitor their performance under the Armed ForcesCovenant." The sexual orientation question is to provide robust estimates to inform policy-making and service provision, particularly for small areas, and for monitoring equality duties. As for the gender identity question, that's particularly zeitgeist at the moment. The Government Equalities Office reckons there may be 200000 to 500000 transgender people in the UK, but doesn't know the true population because of lack of data.
First up comes the normal question about sex. The ONS are keen to maintain statistical continuity year on year, so have avoided a single multi-option question that might skew the data. They've also added a caveat that a gender identity question will follow the sex question, because preliminary research confirmed that this made the question more acceptable to non-binary and transgender people. You can read more about that research, and how they came up with the proposed online guidance, here. The gender question appears several screens later, and it's this.
Initially it's just a yes/no question, which'll send most of the population scooting by. Again there's a caveat, ensuring nobody assumes their precise identity is about to be ignored. I ticked Yes, so didn't get to see what the No option leads to, but the current intention is to provide a write-in section rather than a list of options. If you want to describe yourself as intersex, non-binary, transmale or genderqueer, then you can. I hope the LGBTIQ+ community will find that reassuring. Further refinement will be carried out after this census rehearsal to see if any questions or associated guidance need to be amended, and then the wider population will be asked to volunteer their gender in 2021.
I didn't find the online census form too onerous to fill in. It was easier than finding an approved black or blue pen, filling in a paper questionnaire, popping it into a pre-paid envelope and taking it to a postbox. It'll certainly have been cheaper. I'm told that certain Tower Hamlets residents have been sent a paper questionnaire outright, to help compare their data with us digital respondents. If you live in Hackney, Carlisle or Ceredigion you might have been invited too. And the rest of you should get the opportunity to join in and tell the government all about yourself in eighteen months time (whoever that government might be).
Yesterday TfLannounced that one part of Crossrail will be on time... they will be taking over the line from Paddington to Reading on 15th December 2019. It'll still be branded TfL Rail, because best not attach the Queen's name to an engineering fiasco, but the acquisition will add welcome fares income to the Mayor's coffers.
Not only will this bring central Berkshire onto the tube map, it'll also increase the number of stations Londoners can travel to using Pay As You Go. However, Oyster users will be missing out, as fares to the eight stations from Iver to Reading will be payable by contactless only. It's part of a fresh innovation introduced just four weeks ago, as a National Rail station in Hertfordshire became the first addition to the Contactless-But-Not-Oyster list.
Things were simpler in 2003 when Oyster was introduced. Every London station fell somewhere in zones 1 to 6, and the Herts/Bucks end of the Metropolitan line used zones A, B, C and D, making a total of ten. Those who programmed the system allocated four bits of electronic storage, which in hexadecimal would allow a maximum of 15 zones, hoping that this might be sufficient for the future. It was not. Hence the latest fare zone extension has had to be contactless only, because contactless fares are totted up by TfL overnight so the system can cope with pretty much anything.
Here's a list of all the PAYG stations in all the extra zones currently in use, above and beyond the original 1-6.
Zone 7: Croxley, Watford, Rickmansworth, Chorleywood; Carpenders Park; Theobalds Grove; Waltham Cross Zone 8: Chalfont & Latimer; Bushey, Watford High Street; Cheshunt; Dartford, Swanley Zone 9: Amersham, Chesham; Brentwood; Epsom; Cuffley Zone W: Watford Junction Zone G: Purfleet, Grays, Chafford Hundred, Ockendon Zone B: Broxbourne, Rye House, St Margarets, Ware, Hertford East; Potters Bar, Radlett; Bayford, Hertford North Zone C: Shenfield Zone D: Merstham, Redhill, Earlswood, Salfords, Horley Zone E: Gatwick Airport
You won't see Epsom in zone 9 on public-facing rail maps, because a fare anomaly means its actually cheaper to buy a ticket than use Oyster. Neither will you see any of these lettered zones on the tube map, where they tend to be labelled 'Special fares apply' (or left blank). But they do appear on TfL's in-house PAYG map, the May 2019 version of which is available via an FoI request here.
Officially zone W (Watford) and zone G (Grays) are both part of zone A, creating a proper alphabetical sequence from A to E. Meanwhile the underlying electronics assumes that zone A is 10, zone B is 11, zone C is 12, zone D is 13 and zone E is 14, creating a proper hexadecimal sequence from 1 to E.
There is space on an Oyster card for one more zone - that's zone 15, or zone F. It was TfL's intention to reserve this zone for Crossrail stations out to Reading. They said so in an internal ticketing newsletter circulated this time last year (see pages 10 and 11 for lots more background information), but a later edition suggested this might no longer be the case (page 2), and now we know it won't.
Which brings us to TfL's most recent innovation, stations which aren't in any specific zone because you can't use Oyster, only contactless. The first of these was Brookmans Park on 29th August 2019. Radlett and Potters Bar were added to the PAYG list on the same day, Oyster included, but Brookmans Park (one stop beyond Potters Bar) got to be contactless only. TfL would much rather passengers used contactless than Oyster anyway, because the electronic transaction costs them less, so expect this to be the future direction of travel.
St Albans, Harpenden and Luton Airport Parkway have been lined up to go contactless before the end of the year, maybe in October, followed by Welham Green, Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City in November, although no dates have yet been confirmed. It's long been suggested that Kempton Park, Sunbury, Upper Halliford and Shepperton should be included, being only just outside Greater London, and Reigate too, given that Redhill is already included.
There's substantial scope to extend Contactless Only to other Home Counties stations, if only rail operators were interested and willing. But for now it's only Brookmans Park in the Contactless Only zone, then a few more Hertfordshire stations, and from 2nd January eight Crossrail stations out to Reading. Get ready, those purple trains really are coming. Just don't take your Oyster with you.
Stations outside Greater London but accessible by PAYG (by county)
One day, unless climate change is reversed or our flood defences are improved, much of riverside London will be submerged. Several historic and highly populated areas of the capital are at risk, being not far above current sea level, which ultimately may not be enough to hold back the tide.
So I thought I'd have a look on an Ordnance Survey map to see just how low certain parts of London are. I'm using spot heights, precise locations at which height above sea level is stated. They're fairly rare on the map, but they're more accurate than contours. Here are the really low ones.
On the eastern edge of London, where the A13 makes a break for Thurrock, London is only one metre above sea level. The precise spot is beside an electricity pylon at the point where the A13 viaduct swings across the Chunnel-bound railway. If this area ever flooded road traffic would continue to flow but High Speed One might be in trouble. Wennington Marshes are of course unpopulated, other than by a bird reserve, with the village of Wennington sensibly set back along the 5m contour a few hundred metres beyond. But even a one metre rise in sea level, unchecked, would start to shrink London's land area as the Thames marshes inexorably widened.
Also 1m: I can only find two other places in London with a spot height of 1m, both near Erith. One's on the Belvedere Industrial Estate, where several livelihoods would be affected (but no homes). Crucially the river wall is higher than this (a spot height beside Crossness Pumping Station reads 6m). The other's on the Darent Industrial Park, near Crayford Ness (behind the Darent Flood Barrier).
Well that got very serious very quickly. A spot height on the Ordnance Survey map shows that Downing Street is only 2m above sea level at its junction with Horse Guards Road, just behind the Foreign Office. Horseguards Parade is just up the road. St James's Park is immediately opposite (with a lake that one day risks becoming rather larger). Whitehall is clearly an area that the UK government would protect at all costs against the onslaught of rising sea level, but this gives some idea of the scale of the problem London might be up against.
n.b. Buckingham Palace is above the 5m contour, and Hyde Park Corner is at 13m, while Piccadilly Circus and St Paul's Cathedral are comfortably above 30m. Almost all of the City and most of the West End is perfectly safe, but low-lying Westminster is not.
Also 2m: Industrial estates on Ferry Lane, Rainham, beside Rainham Marshes Also 2m: Entrance to the former Ford motor works, Dagenham, off Ripple Road Also 2m: The Thames View estate, Barking Riverside, at the junction with River Road Also 2m:Barking Road, East Ham, near the North Circular (a mile and a half from the Thames, courtesy of the River Roding) Also 2m: The shopping centre on Pier Road, North Woolwich, near King George V station Also 2m:North Woolwich Road through Silvertown, close to Pontoon Dock station Also 2m:Freemasons Road, Canning Town, close to the A13 (a full mile from the Thames, because south Newham is really floodable) Also 2m: Beside the Twelvetrees gasholders, to the west of West Ham station (much of the Newham side of the Lea is low-lying) Also 2m:Thames Barrier Control Centre, Charlton (reassuringly) Also 2m:Thames Road, Barnes Cray, where the railway to Dartford crosses the road to Dartford
You might expect Thamesmead to be low-lying, given it was built across the Plumstead and Erith marshes, a huge estuary-side expanse previously uninhabited. But low-lying Abbey Road lies on its southern edge, fairly near Abbey Wood station, with well over a mile of densely populated housing between the spot height and the river. Thamesmead's flood defences are of course substantial, because the GLC wouldn't have built an enormous housing estate here otherwise, but tens of thousands of people live here only a few metres above sea level. The monks knew what they were doing when they established Lesnes Abbey on the steep ridge immediately behind.
Also 3m:The Oval, Kennington. Yes, that is the cricket ground in south London, the 3m spot height specifically amid the clump of gasholders at the Vauxhall End. The largest flood risk zone in central London covers much of northern Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, with Bermondsey one of the areas to suffer most the last time the Thames broke its banks. It's a shame the OS have no other spot heights across this contour-free zone, but it spreads a lot further than you might think.
I wasn't expecting to find a 4m spot height as far upriver as this, but there it is on Peterborough Road between the Hurlingham Club and Wandsworth Bridge. Even Fulham Palace Road only gets a 6, and there are two other 6m spot heights even further inland at Turnham Green and Acton Green. Fulham and Chiswick are unexpected suburbs to be at genuine risk of flooding, given that so many downriver are not, but borough evacuation plans confirm the local peril.
I can't find any 5m spot heights on the current Ordnance Survey map, but 5m contours run through such spots as Stratford town centre, the Millennium Dome, Camberwell Church Street and Wandsworth Road station. We may be centuries off those being submerged, or they may already be in their last hundred years as physical locations above the waterline. Best take climate change seriously, else large parts of London may require cripplingly expensive protection or be irretrievably lost.
My BBC iPlayer Radio app was killed off yesterday, and I had to download BBC Sounds instead. I'm not best pleased.
Here's a comments box solely for discussing BBC Sounds.
Today's post continues below.comments
One of the things I don't like about BBC Sounds is its insistence on recommending things. It thinks it knows what I'd like to listen to, and prioritises that, but generally it thinks wrong. I'd prefer the ability to tell the app what I'm interested in, but instead an algorithm insists on deciding for me, and it's less good at knowing my mind than I am.
Several other digital services use recommendations to get us to interact more. YouTube, for example, throws up a whole load of suggestions every time you watch a video, and autoplays the top one unless you tell it not to. I quite enjoy going down the list and clicking on 'Not interested', just to confuse the algorithm, but seemingly it never forgets. Even if I only ever watched a particular genre of video once, because it turned out not to be very interesting, it still keeps popping up and I can't make it go away.
TV streaming services are also particularly keen on recommendations. As soon as one programme finishes, or nearly finishes, they chip in with what they think you should watch next, and hey presto up it comes unless you deliberately act to stop it. Usually it's the next programme in the series, which makes sense, but it is still a broad assumption that you want more of the same, or a desperate attempt to keep your attention, or both.
Spotify would rather serve you playlists than albums, a stream of daily listening selected by an unseen algorithm. My iPlayer homepage has a string of TV recommendations, most of which I know I've already watched, or else know I have no intention of ever doing so. Twitter and Facebook prefer to replace chronological order with content they think you'll like instead, and make it damned hard to switch such tampering off. And Google often precedes its search results with recommendations of its own, for which read paid-for advertising, as those with money seek to skew your agenda.
Train an algorithm well and maybe it does deliver more of what you're actually interested in. Sometimes a recommendation can throw up something you might never have realised you really wanted to experience. If there are jewels out that there millions of other people have loved, might you not enjoy them too? Many of your favourite bands, books, podcasts, programmes, whatever, may first have popped up in someone else's recommendations. But those recommendations probably had a human hand behind them, rather than automated crowd-sourced advice.
I like to be my own curator. I don't go on YouTube with the intention of sitting in front of it for two hours while it plays whatever it wants. I find it quite unnerving that people do, especially when what's served up probably includes paid-for content, and has been known to feature extremist political material. I go to the television to watch my choice of what's available, not to pick one of the three most heavily-promoted options. Although the full range of content is always there underneath, it's increasingly hidden beneath layers of Now Watch This.
Recommendations are nothing new, of course. The Britannia Music Club spent decades sending subscribers an album of the month unless they chipped in and stopped it. Readers Digest did something very similar with books. Newspapers have always been an editor's choice of news and features, not your own. And what are traditional TV and radio anyway, other than a stream of recommended content strung out in linear fashion over which you have no control whatsoever, other than to turn them off.
Our online lives are increasing blighted by recommendations, most of it algorithmic, much of it advertising masquerading as content. It's getting harder to be shown everything and make your own selection, rather than nudged off down a path of somebody else's choosing. How long before we lose control altogether and find our choices being constrained solely by what others recommend? And if you've enjoyed today's post please don't leave me, perhaps you'd enjoy reading oneofthesefascinatingoldstories next instead.
