Between May and August 2005 ONS ran a public consultation on the content of the 2011 Census questionnaire for England and Wales. Overall, a higher than anticipated response was received with approximately 2,000 submissions from nearly 500 organisations or individuals across central and local government, academia, business, special interest groups and the general public.
The consultation exercise supported the need for almost all information collected in the 2001 Census. However, strong cases were also made for some new questions, especially language, sexual orientation, income and second residences.
The responses have been evaluated using the criteria outlined in the original consultation document to provide an assessment of user requirement. Topics have also been provisionally evaluated in terms of other factors that will influence the final content of the questionnaire, such as data quality, public acceptability and respondent burden. This has resulted in the allocation of each topic to one of three categories:
Topics likely to be collected in the 2011 Census;
Topics where further research and assessment is required before a decision is made on whether to collect information on them in the 2011 Census; or
Topics which will not be included in the 2011 Census.
There are substantially more topics in the second category than there will be space for on the 2011 Census questionnaire, and so there are some difficult trade-offs ahead. These decisions will be informed by the programme of question development and testing that is underway. The emerging results of this testing will determine the choice of questions included in the 2007 Census Test. The Test questionnaires will be finalised in September 2006. The consultation process is ongoing and we aim to finalise the 2011 Census questionnaire by September 2008, for use in the 2009 Census rehearsal. The final questionnaire for 2011 will then be decided by parliament.
A full report on the response to the consultation, including an updated ONS view on the likely content of the 2011 Census questionnaire, was published on 8 March 2006 and is available on the National Statistics website.
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