You asked
The "spell checking" for the 2021 Census was based on US English rather than on British English. The web browser that I use also spell checks as I type and a basic check confirmed that it flagged "centers" as a spelling error (it is set to British English) but not "centres", whereas during completion of the 2021 Census return the converse was the case.
1) Why was the Census for England & Wales expected to be completed by US citizens rather than by UK citizens?
2) Why was it that Crown servants were only able to complete the Census by wrongly declaring themselves as "employees" when in fact they are not employees and do not have the legal protection of employees?
We said
Thank you for your request.
With regards to your first question, we can confirm that there is no spellchecking on the Census 2021 electronic questionnaire. Any spellchecking will have been provided by the system or browser that the questionnaire was filled out on.
Regarding your second question, the data need for this question relates to deriving economic activity, as described in the 2021 Census topic consultation response on Labour Market (809.1 kB pdf). The questions have been designed to meet that need and were asked in the same way in 2011. Information on the development of the labour market questions on economic activity is contained in the Economic activity and hours worked question development report.
As neither a data user, nor a respondent need to classify Crown servants separately to employees was identified, we did not do so.