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?
Don't ditch the postcode!
Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on 02/02/2007 - 15:31
I appreciate that other users may have control over the databases that they are using, and require accuracy that means that the 2.5% of postcodes that straddle OA boundaries is problematic (well, I'd rather they didn't straddle, but for me it's tolerable).
I'm involved in the secondary use of customer databases, joining them up to create a dataset that represents almost an entire sector. The data that is collected is for customer service/marketing requirements, and as such I don't see that they are going to go beyond collecting postal addresses any time soon. As such, postcodes are an invaluable glue for datasets over which we have little control but which can be put to many good uses.