Meeting new challenges posed by the UK Censuses

This paper builds on and extends a presentation at IASSIST2023 which outlined the challenges faced in disseminating data from the 2021/2022 Censuses in the United Kingdom, as part of the UK Data Service (UKDS). The UKDS is a key part of UK research infrastructure, and provides a wide range of social sciences, humanities, and economic research data with census data being one of the major collections.

A range of tools have been developed within UKDS to provide access to data, and these continue to be extended. New workflows exist for aggregate data and for origin-destination data – the latter being addressed in detail in a separate submission to this conference. In this paper we illustrate the full set of current tools, explain how they can be used, and showcase examples of analysis. Census data are disseminated with a variety of license arrangements: open, safeguarded, and secure, and we reflect on shifting balances of risk appetite, and what this means for researchers, including those based outside the UK.

We also reflect more broadly on long-standing and new challenges faced in disseminating this data: the size and complexity of the resulting outputs; user expectations; new competitors etc. The 2021 census round in the UK was notable for a number of reasons: operational changes enforced by the covid-19 pandemic including deferment in Scotland, new questions and legal challenges to question and guidance wording. The wider context is a public consultation over the future of population and migration data collection in the UK, with the possibility that the 2021 census will also turn out to have the last such census, and thus we also reflect on how we can adapt a census archive/service to a future 'administrative based census' archive/service, with more frequent data about which researchers may be less aware.