You see, what Railtrack does is to work out the charges it has to levy to make that valuation right.”"But who pays the charges?”"The new operating companies that BR has been split up into – like Scotrail and South West Trains.”"But they make big losses at the moment, don’t they?”"Virtually every part of the network does. How come Railtrack is worth all this money if the railway makes such big losses?”"Ah, that’s the beauty of it. And then the Treasury wants Railtrack to earn a respectable rate of return on all that money.”Now Thomas was even more puzzled: “There’s something I don’t get here. It’s a fancy term for working out, more or less, what it would cost to replace the railway as it stands. They came up with the answer only this year.”"But how come there’s all this talk now about closing down lines, if they’re worth so much?”"Well, £6.5bn worth of capital assets needs a lot of money spent on it to keep it up to scratch. “How did they work that out?”"The Government used a method called `modern equivalent asset valuation’.

He’d never been very good at figures, but that did sound like an awful lot of money. Just think of them – thousands and thousands of miles of track.”"How much are they worth?”"£6.5bn.”Thomas gasped. But on t he other hand, the nice chief station master, John Major, had dismissed all that as a scare story Who was he to believe?

Ah, there was the Fat Controller He worked for Railtrack now He’d know who was right. He’d understand how the Government’s new model railway would work – and who would pay for it.
“What you’ve got to understand, Thomas, is that all these lines you steam up and down on are worth a small fortune. A shiver went down Thomas’s spine: that would be like the Beeching cuts all over again. WORMALD Director and Registrar General Office of Population Censuses and Surveys London, WC223 December.

Thomas the Tank Engine was puzzled. On the one hand, there’d been all those rumours coming down the line that half the network was going to be closed. Subsequently, there will be full consultation on any proposals we bring forward for changes to the way censuses are conducted.Yours faithfully, P J. Various studies have been carried out and we are working closely with the British Society for Population Studies and theRoyal Statistical Society in organising an open conference on this subject in April. The final estimates have been in the public domain and accepted for the last year and a half.I do accept the need to find ways of improving the quality of future censuses This is a major task on which we are already embarked. Other sources were accordingly used to supplement the census information for this group in particular.Details of the adjustments made to produce population estimates were published in various OPCS publications and the procedures were quality assured by an eminent external adviser, Professor Ian Diamond of Southampton University, who has publicly said that he is completely satisfied with them.

For 1991, ouranalysis indicated that there were particular deficiencies in the census counts for men aged 20-30. But in producing population estimates, the Office of Population and Census Surveys (OPCS) draws on other sources of information as well as on the census. These are far and away the best figures of their kind.
As well as publishing results on the census, we take seriously our duty to inform users of the quality of the statistics. We first published details of the census undercount in October 1992 and have published further details at regular intervals.

Most r ecently, we have published the Census Validation Survey, which contains very detailed information on the quality of census outputs.A key use of the census is to update population estimates at national and local level. The census is the largest data set available on the social condition of the population. It provides invaluable information for small areas to enable key planning decisions to be made. We have published more than 400 volumes of results for local areas and for particular topics. The suggestion that the census figures have been abandoned is complete nonsense.