Political stupidity

There’s not much point in having a census if it doesn’t collect basic information such as the sex of the customer. If ticking the boxes is optional, all the census becomes is just make-work for the people employed by the census industry, which is outwith government control, like the Bank of England, and the statistics manufacturing industry. Pandering to tiny minorities at the expense of doing a proper job also renders census data worthless to future generations of historians.