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Coverage

England and Wales

Units

Persons

Keywords

Occupation,Distance travelled to work,Works from home,Travel to work

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About this dataset

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents in England and Wales by distance travelled to work and by occupation. The estimates are as at Census Day, 21 March 2021.

Protecting personal data

Sometimes we need to make changes to data if it is possible to identify individuals. This is known as statistical disclosure control. In Census 2021, we:

  • Swapped records (targeted record swapping), for example, if a household was likely to be identified in datasets because it has unusual characteristics, we swapped the record with a similar one from a nearby small area. Very unusual households could be swapped with one in a nearby local authority.
  • Added small changes to some counts (cell key perturbation), for example, we might change a count of four to a three or a five. This might make small differences between tables depending on how the data are broken down when we applied perturbation.

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About the variables

Occupation (current) (10 categories)

Description: Classifies what people aged 16 years and over do as their main job. Their job title or details of activities they do in their job and any supervisory or management responsibilities form this classification. This information is used to code responses to an occupation using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020. It classifies people who were in employment between 15 March and 21 March 2021, by the SOC code that represents their current occupation. The lowest level of detail available is the four-digit SOC code which includes all codes in three, two and one digit SOC code levels.

Quality information: As Census 2021 was during a unique period of rapid change, take care when using this data for planning purposes.

Comparability with 2011: Not comparable. We changed the classification for Census 2021 and combined the categories previously available in the 2011 Census data.

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Distance travelled to work (6 categories)

Description: The distance, in kilometres, between a person's residential postcode and their workplace postcode measured in a straight line. A distance travelled of 0.1km indicates that the workplace postcode is the same as the residential postcode. Distances over 1200km are treated as invalid, and an imputed or estimated value is added.

"Work mainly at or from home" is made up of those that ticked either the 'Mainly work at or from home' box for the address of workplace question, or the "Work mainly at or from home" box for the method of travel to work question.

"Other" includes no fixed place of work, working on an offshore installation and working outside of the UK.

Distance is calculated as the straight line distance between the enumeration postcode and the workplace postcode.

Quality information: As Census 2021 was during a unique period of rapid change, take care when using this data for planning purposes.

Comparability with 2011: Not comparable. It is difficult to compare this variable with the 2011 Census because Census 2021 took place during a national lockdown. The government advice at the time was for people to work from home (if they can) and avoid public transport.

Only those who work at a workplace or depot gave their workplace address. This means that the number of people who answered this question is a significantly smaller proportion of the population than normal.

People who were on furlough (about 5.6 million), could have given details based on their patterns before or during the pandemic, or what they did during the census taking place, including Census Day.

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