There’s been a lot of news coverage of the PM’s petitions website in the last week, to do with the issue of charging for use of the UK’s roads, but one of the most popular petitions at the moment is one which relates to access to UK census data:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reduce the classified period for census data from 100 years to 70 years. This would allow census information from 1911, 1921 and 1931 to be used by the general public researching their family history in the absence (or failing memories) of their elderly relatives. Birth, Marriage and Death information is already available so why is information about where people lived hidden.

This has attracted over 21,000 signatures so far, making it the fourth most popular on the site.

The image of an 1891 census return was taken from The National Archives’ Learning Curve resource, Focus on the Census.