Fair play for not letting him in even with ID you can’t be too careful. have you asked your neighbors if they’ve had similar encounters with these people? 😉

Yeah i had a look as well, Doesn’t tell you much does it. If they knock again tell them that you don’t want to take part and if they keep at it, take their names and company name and telephone number and phone em directly.
If it’s a mobile number and not a landline number phone your local police station and inform them about it. sounds a bit iffy to me:wink:

These surveys are quite common in some areas.

They deliberately tend to pick Sheffield in the North and Reading in the South as these are viewed as the two most “average” areas of England.

They aren’t actually interested in individuals but groups of statistics – they don’t even ask for full names – the info they collect is anonymised and encrypted and is supposed to be available to all on the website to get an idea of various statistics in Britain.

You can actually download loads of stuff from that site but a lot of it is detailed and complicated or fairly obscure (such as 10% of all over-65s in England and wales complaining that there were mice/rats in their house!)

There is no obligation to complete the surveys though, and if you refuse to do so the collectors should not persist in asking you.

if other govt departments followed the ONS procedures and systems there wouldn’t be so much stuff being lost (much of this is due to part-privatisation of services, and the use of insecure transfer methods)

I’ve seen an ONS workers laptop in action, they actually do use a custom designed application which generates what looks like a random data file rather than bog-standard Microsoft or Oracle applications – if the machine got lost it would be a non trivial job to decode it (and they don’t store the names and addresses on the same machines) – nearly all govt depts had custom systems (usually built in house) like this until fairly recently, but many have moved to MS/Oracle as part of various outsourcing deals (this is the source of most of the leaks/insecurities in public sector IT)

this is probably what the survey is about

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/about/surveys/default.asp

but if you tell them you won’t fill it in because you are concerned about the risk of data loss, then they have to feed back that response to the survey managers 😉

tell him to fuck off cause you aint catering to the man

i had a similar thing happen to me, and it was some mandatory government thing like this, every 4th house in the street or some crap. Anyway this bloke’s coming around once a month asking random questions. First time i did the sieve was out side the front door, second time we let him in, third time he turned up on a Friday arvo. let him in. had a few mates over wear all getin mashed. needless to say we didn’t see him again.:cry:

I really hate this kind of thing, government forcing themselves into your home.

I don’t open the door unless I’m expecting someone or a parcel.

If they persist I just shout at them to fuck off and hassle someone else. Its not just that I don’t like people coming into my house unless I trust them its more that I can’tr be arsed gettin dressed.