New uses for administrative data in place of censuses:
Oliver Duke-Williams, @oliver_dw, Senior Lecturer in Digital Information Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCL and Co-Investigator at the UK Data Service, updates us on proposed new uses for administrative data in place of censuses in the area of estimates of journeys to work.
In November, the Office for National Statistics qatar rcs data (ONS)’s Administrative Data Census Project released some updates on their progress including estimates of ethnicity and journey to work.
There is considerable interest both within ONS and the other UK statistical agencies, and in the wider community, including the academic Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN) in the use of administrative data to wholly or partially replace the decennial census. The logic for this approach is clear; taking a census is an expensive operation and the data captured become increasingly out of date as time moves on.
Much data is gathered by a variety of national and local government departments and agencies as part of their everyday operation, and some of these data cover similar demographic themes to those data collected by a census. If it were possible to extract from these administrative sources equivalent data to those data collected by censuses, then it may be possible to save the expense of conducting a census and have continually updated data.