Local Government Finance

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly fair point. Usually in this annual debate, the concern is that population figures are out of date, as opposed to about to be updated. The census is therefore enormously important, as is the ongoing work, on which the Office for National Statistics is consulting, about better ways of capturing more rapid short-term changes in population of the sort that we saw in the middle of the last decade. His point is well taken and well made, but I assure him that everybody concerned with the census is working enormously hard to ensure that it produces the accurate basis on which future local government projections can be carried out.