Manpower planning is not normally a topic of considerable interest for most psychiatrists. That is, until their trust is faced with recruiting a new or replacement consultant from what may seem to be an ever diminishing pool of qualified applicants. “Where have all the specialist registrars gone?” is often the woeful cry which goes up after increasingly large and ever more expensive advertisements fail to draw in desperately needed recruits. Having an accurate picture of the current state of the psychiatric workforce and seeing the trends in recruitment and retention at all grades is vitally important for the profession. It was the realisation of the gross inadequacy of officially collected statistics some years back which led to the first College census on psychiatric staffing.