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?
well, just one more comment on postcodes
Posted by Di Greaves, Powys CC Research and Information manager (not verified) on 01/02/2007 - 14:36
I said I'd get on with the consultation now but....
Tim says " The fact is using XY co-ordinates for example would be a pain for our business, simply because everyone knows their postcodes, few know the co-ordinates of their property."
but the beauty of the NLPG system is they dont need to know the grid reference and neither do you, the researcher! You just have to also record their house name or number which is unique within the postcode, (now dont tell me they dont know that either!) Given these basic address elements the NLPG will give you the UPRN,and the grid reference .
Suppose they won't give you the house name/number because they like the faint element of anonymity within the postcode group of addresses, or they dont want to get on your mailing list? then that's another question, a choice to be made in the research design; EITHER
to provide reassurance / incentives sufficient for collection of house names/numbers
OR
straight away attach to the record the grid reference for the current population weighted centroid of the postcode or the best available postcode polygon. (But please dont wait a year before doing this because centroids and polygons will surely have changed by then)
Di