Cornwall’s Cornish census tick box petition set to fall short

With four days left on the clock, a parliamentary petition to give Cornish people their own box to tick on the 2031 census looks unlikely to clear the bar that would force a government response.

What the petition is asking for

The petition, launched on the Parliament website by Johnny Phillips, wants the government to add a dedicated “Cornish” option to the national identity question on the next census. At the moment, anyone who wants to record their identity as Cornish has to select “Other” and write it in by hand. Reach 10,000 signatures and ministers have to respond. Reach 100,000 and it could be debated in Parliament. With the petition closing on Thursday 24 September and just over 5,500 names on it, the first of those thresholds is looking a stretch.

Who’s behind it

Support has come from several directions in Cornish politics without translating into a rush of signatures. Cornwall Council has backed the campaign, with council leader Cllr Leigh Frost saying: “Despite being formally recognised by the UK government as a national minority, the Cornish people are still not given their own tick box in the census national identity question. That needs to change.” Camborne and Redruth’s Labour MP, Perran Moon, has raised the issue in the House of Commons, while Mebyon Kernow and Cornish language and culture groups including Agan Tavas have added their voices. So far, that backing hasn’t been enough to shift the numbers much.

📷Petition signatures by constituency, shaded by share of population signed. Credit: petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com

Where the support is coming from

The petition’s own constituency map, which shades each seat by the share of its population who have signed, shows how lopsided that support is. Every constituency in Cornwall, from Land’s End to the Tamar and out to the Isles of Scilly, sits in the two darkest bands on the map, putting upwards of half a percent of the population behind it. Cross into Devon and that drops away fast. Most constituencies there sit under 0.2%, with just one, in the South Hams area, standing out a little from its neighbours without coming close to Cornwall’s numbers.

A tick box has been fought for before

This isn’t the first attempt. Between 2018 and 2019, a double-decker “Tickbox Bus” toured Cornwall, converted into a mock Cornish embassy and taken to 20 events including the Royal Cornwall Show and the Man Engine Resurrection Tour. It put the question to 4,600 people face to face, and 94% of them backed the idea of a Cornish tick box. The campaign didn’t win a box on the 2021 census either.

What the write-in figures already show

The Office for National Statistics recorded 117,350 people identifying as Cornish in the 2021 census, all of them through the write-in option rather than a tick box. Of those, 88.0% were living in Cornwall itself, working out at 18.1% of the county’s population. The figures also point to an older group of people making that choice. Those identifying as Cornish and living in Cornwall had a median age of 49, and those doing so from outside the county had a median age of 46, against a median of 40 for the population of England and Wales as a whole.

A possible reason for the slow start

That older age profile may be one factor behind the petition’s sluggish signature count, given how much of the campaigning for parliamentary petitions happens online and through social media. Timing may not have helped either. The petition follows last year’s separate campaign for Cornwall to be recognised as the UK’s “fifth nation,” which cleared 12,000 signatures and won a formal government response within weeks, and some fatigue after that campaign could be blunting momentum this time round.

Whatever the reason, the petition stays open until Thursday. After that, it’s a question of whether 5,500-odd names is enough to keep the argument alive, or whether it joins the rejected 2021 census petition as another attempt that didn’t clear the first hurdle.