Online census fiasco slammed by Audit Office

The National Audit Office (NAO) has today revealed details of the problems that saw the 1901 census website brought down - and pointed the finger at under-financing and shoddy subcontracting.

The site crashed due to enthusiasm on the part of it users – which numbered over a million by noon of the day of its launch in January 2002, while the Public Records Office had only banked on a fraction of that. The report from the NAO said that should the site have had access to more in the way of financing, it could have coped with a far greater number of hits.

Originally, the Public Records Office had selected QinetiQ to put all the records online, which in turn farmed the work out to the Prison Service, with the idea of using prisoners to put the paper records into electronic format.

The prisoners took too long to input the records and often weren't up to speed on how to use technology - which meant the project was then subcontracted to workers India and Sri Lanka - costing the Prison Service £1.8m.

The conclusions from the NAO on how to go about putting the 1911 census online in the future advocates having some form of disaster recovery system in place to prevent a repeat of the 1901 fiasco.

It's not all bad news, though - the phenomenal popularity of the site has been a big moneyspinner for the Public records Office, which has earned around £4.5m to date from the online census information.