Representative
About
The ONS is keen to establish a long term, small area geography policy which will be used for Census 2011 and Neighbourhood Statistics. The aim is to support the production of coherent and useful data that can be used with confidence by all organisations.
The consultation paper is available online. This describes all policy proposals, the background to them, and a number of attendant issues. Please take the time to get involved by responding to the survey and joining in the debate around the blog posts.
Latest Posts
- The consultation has now closed .........
- Consultation period ends this Friday (16th Feb)
- Do you use Output Areas?
- Don't forget the surveys
- How important are postcodes?
- Should boundaries be tied to the real world?
- Festive messages
- Health data? Ethnicity data? Do we need bigger areas?
- Consultation document
- OAs and SOAs - Stick or Twist?
Stability, consistency, democracy
Posted by Simon Dickson (not verified) on 30/11/2006 - 12:16
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that a stable approach to geography would have a huge beneficial impact on official statistics generally, and their use across the entire population.
I spent more than two years working at ONS, leading web development efforts. We were ambitious, and I don't regret that: but every time we worked up an idea to make statistics more accessible to the general public, someone would throw the geography spanner into the works, and things would become too complicated to ever deliver. (If you need a case study, just look at Neighbourhood Statistics - sorry folks.) I felt it was becoming a stock excuse, and it made people start projects with an expectation of failure.
My memory may be failing me here, but weren't OAs and SOAs conceived with the intention of being a consistent future-proof standard? I have been out of the stats business for some time, so I don't know what has happened in the meanwhile.
But I do know one thing: a bad standard is still much, much better than no standard at all.