Representative
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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?
If only they were!
Posted by Di Greaves, Powys CC Research and Information manager (not verified) on 01/02/2007 - 13:47
Unfortunately, Clive, it is not true that postcode data "is a constant geographical reference within both the census data and every address for every customer."
Post codes are created, deleted and frequently revised solely for the business purposes of the organisation that owns them. They are not consistent over time, the postcode set used in the 2001 Census does not match the postcode set as it exists today. Postcodes don't nest within any administrative boundaries anywhere in the UK, they can't be used to assign records accurately between Wales and England, let alone between two wards or parishes.
The data and the metadata are not freely accessible and creating an accurate set of statistics by matching postcodes from a data set compiled over a number of years is a logistical nightmare.
They have been useful, but only because they were the first small area, hierarchical, geographic coding with national coverage to become available. Their day will soon be past for research and statistics.
Now we have these excellent LLPGs established in the NLPG framework, created by local government and stamping a UPRN on a property at the very start of its address lifecycle when it acquires a street name /number / house name. Right from the start there is no question about where exactly it is, because the grid reference is recorded and attached to the UPRN at the moment of creation by the local authority who are there on the ground inspecting the building. The LLPG also of course provides a vehicle for recording and date stamping the changes in postcode for a property. (And for adding in the TOID when the building is surveyed and added to the OS mapping)
The UPRN system devised in the NLPG is so much better than the postcode set as a geo-referencing tool; its accurate, stable, and can be used to build small area geographies from single addresses upwards. With the help of the NLPG we can actually make better informed use of postcoded data, but once having access to the UPRN, no-one in their right mind would record the postcode only on a database record, (would they?)
As you can tell I am passionate about this! Now I'v got that off my chest, on with the consultation, sorry to come in so late in the day, have been a bit busy here,
Di