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Personally I'm delighted to hear that ONS are finally considering prioritising geographical comparability over time ahead of capturing "this year's" ward geography. (In 2001, of course, the decision was made the other way around.) Given where we are at, keeping the current SOAs for mid-layer 2011 outputs is the obvious way to go - if nothing else, it allows a more direct hook into the wealth of non-census information now made for these boundaries. Probably the same arguement applies for 2001 OAs, although I would be interested to see how many have to be changed/merged in order to keep populations above disclosure thresholds - or to reflect the building of new roads that cleave existing 'neighbourhoods' in half. The downside of going with SOAs and OAs is that, over time, they will become an increasingly irrational basis for an output geography due to population and other changes (ward bounardy changes, road and house building etc) that undermine the rationale for their original creation. For this reason, I still continue to believe that the 'real' solution to all of these problems is to adopt a grid-based geography, with sub-division/ aggregation of grid cells over time to keep cell populations only just above threshold, and with look-up tables (and utilities) provided to allow users to derive best estimates of their desired output geography(ies). A helpful spin-off is that the digitised boundaries of a cell-based geography would be cheap and easy to create and disseminate without the current troublesome copyright issues that attach to OA/SOA boundaries. From this point of view, going with SOAs for 2011 merely puts of the 'inevitable' for another few years...