National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, joins Miles in a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking, to look back on some of the highlights and challenges for the ONS in 2022 while gazing positively, but objectively, towards 2023.    TRANSCRIPT    MILES FLETCHER  Hello, and as another statistical year draws to an end you join us for a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking.   I'm Miles Fletcher and with me this time is the national statistician himself, Sir Ian Diamond. We're going to pick out some of the key stats from another momentous year. Talk about some of its highlights and the challenges faced by the Office for National Statistics. We’ll gaze positively, but objectively, into 2023 and Sir Ian will be answering some of the questions that you our listeners wanted us to ask.   Ian, welcome once again to statistically speaking.    IAN DIAMOND  First, thanks very much for that introduction. And can I offer festive greetings to all of your listeners?    MILES  Yes, it's come around again quickly, hasn't it? So much to talk about from the past year, but let's kick off with a very big number in every sense, and that's 59,597,542    IAN  ...is the population of England and Wales according to the census, and one, which I have to say is one of the greatest censuses that has ever been undertaken. And it's just an absolute thrill to commend my colleagues who have worked so hard to deliver it but also to every citizen of England and Wales who filled in those forms in 2021, and of course, those in Northern Ireland as well.    MILES  Now, you had to press the button, both on the decision to have that field operation go out in March 2021, against the backdrop of the pandemic, and then of course, to sign off on the results. How difficult were those decisions?    IAN  Well, I'm not going to say it was difficult Miles, I mean, it was a difficult decision, but if you surround yourself with all the information, so before we took the decision to go with a 2021 census, we looked at all the upsides, all the downsides. We measured the risks. We looked at the cost of delaying and we looked at the chance that we would get a decent count, and whether people were looking like they were now prepared to fill in forms, which have a whole set of risks. Was there an algorithm that told us what to do? I'm afraid there isn't an algorithm at the end of the day, I had to make a decision. I made that decision in collaboration with my colleagues. It was a decision we took together, and I think in every way it was the right decision. And it was a real privilege for me to work with the team in March and April, as we looked at the numbers, and for the first time, and I think it's a really important milestone, that for the very first time we shared our results with the local authorities. I have always believed that you need to involve the people on the ground to sense check the numbers and so for the first time ever, we invited local authorities to be part of the quality assurance process. So we contacted them under a nondisclosure agreement. You have access to the numbers, let's have a conversation and then we can co-create the numbers so that we all feel comfortable and local authorities to their great credit, really embraced this opportunity to co-create what was a great piece of work. We believe that helped, that the numbers that we were able to produce, we felt we had much more traction. And so it really was a national effort to produce those numbers. And I'm very proud of them.    MILES  In hindsight, and of course, it's easy to look at things in hindsight, but did you think it helped that essentially there was a captive audience?     IAN  Not at all. I completely disagree. I think the reason for the high numbers wasn't a captive audience. Let's remember that a very high proportion of the population were not able to lock down, they had to go out to work. T