THE disastrous project to publish the 1901 census online was blighted from the start when prisoners recruited to input the data threw a screw in the works.

Prisoners were supposed to enter details of 32.5 million census records — including those of the future Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Charlie Chaplin — on computer as part of an inmate employment project. But whenever a person’s employment was listed as prison warder or gaoler, the inmates entered the word “screw”.

They also proved to be such slow workers that the Prison Service could not rely on them to get the job done on time. In the end it sent much of the work to India and Sri Lanka at a cost of £2.9 million — more than twice what it was being paid for the job.

The latest twist in the online census saga is published today in a report by the National Audit Office, which also describes how the Public Record Office hugely underestimated public interest in the project.

The PRO had decided to put the entire 1901 census online after the standard 100-year moratorium and created a website designed to cope with 1.2 million hits a day.

The site was launched on January 2, 2001 — and by midday it was attracting 1.2 million hits an hour as hordes of amateur genealogists combined with surfers drawn by names such as Chaplin, Claude Monet, H.G. Wells, Agatha Christie and Florence Nightingale to swamp the site.

It repeatedly crashed and after five days of disaster, the PRO and its contractor QinetiQ closed the site. It remained down for 11 months.

Yesterday’s report says the Public Record Office strategy had been based on a low-key launch, but press interest was high and public interest was heightened because it took place during the new year holiday period.

The report says that the “ambitious project” was ultimately successful — after 11 months of difficulties.

“The initial crash was triggered by overwhelming demand that caused technical problems for a system which was designed for much lower capacity, and which was not able to divert such a large initial surge of traffic.

“The resolution of these problems became protracted, due to the parties failing easily to agree on the results from their separate testing programmes, and the relationship between the parties deteriorated.”

Of the prisoners’ contribution to the problems, the report says that the Prison Service had been forced to concede that it “could not complete the data preparation to a quality standard and to a timetable that would not prejudice” the rest of the project.

In the end only 22 per cent of the data was input by prisoners. The Prison Service was paid £1.1 million for the work and ended up losing £1.8 million, which it had to find by savings in other areas.

A statement from the Prison Service said: “In all commercial undertakings there is a risk element.

“In hindsight the Prison Service overestimated its capacity to deliver both the quality and quantity of work required. Painful lessons have been learnt.”

But the statement added that it would be wrong to view the money as “wasted” as it had provided purposeful activity for prisoners as well as data entry skills that could be used on release.

The census website was relaunched in November 2001. It is now visited by between 8,000 and 10,000 users a day.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled