Why GMAP are Excited About the 2021 Census

The Government primarily uses the Census for policy and planning purposes. For example, it is used to develop policies, allocate money to local authorities, and contributes to localised governance regarding public services including transport, education, and healthcare. This year the Census will be particularly insightful in understanding the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic ‘to make sure that the services you use meet the needs of our changing society. This could include hospitals, schools, universities, and job centres’ (census.gov.uk). 

The outputs of the Census are also used by other stakeholders, such as charities, community groups, students, researchers, and academics to name a few. In addition, Census statistics also help businesses, like us at GMAP, to understand customers, inform business decision making and minimise risk. There is limited cost to end users, but the business benefits can be significant. For example, we use Census data to help our clients in their marketing decisions such as determining the best places to invest in advertising or where people should be surveyed. We also use Census data as a factor in our retail location planning consultancy projects to depict where our clients should locate their outlets to best serve their target consumers. In addition, solutions derived from Census data can be used to tailor the products and services offered in individual stores.

For the first time, the 2021 Census is a digital-first census, whereby people are encouraged to respond online. Although online was an option in 2011, Covid-19 has driven the Census to being ‘online-first’. Census field officers will still be visiting the households of those who do not complete Census, whilst socially distanced and with PPE. The field officers have previous played a vital role in contributing to the Census data quality measures that resulted in the high 94% response rate in 2011.

The Census provides a cross-sectional view of the population at a single point-in-time. Therefore, this Sunday’s Census on 21st March 2021 will provide data on the population during Covid-19, and even a national lockdown. Questions such as those around travel to work are based on current circumstances, and consequently will capture how Covid-19 has impacted people’s lives. 

Like many companies, all of us at GMAP are working from home at the moment, whereas that would not normally be the case! It will be useful to understand the number of people that were working from home at this point-in-time when looking backwards at assessing the impact of Covid-19. However, assuming we all return to our offices at least some of the time, the work from home data capture from this current lockdown will be irrelevant in future planning in 5 years’ time. Therefore, what will we use to measure travel to work in the interim between the new normal and the next Census? 

At GMAP, we are regular end users of the Census data. It is one of the factors used in our project consultancy work, to provide location intelligence and as part of our location planning model. We also provide our clients access to the Census data in our MVPLUS mapping tool, which allows users to manipulate, extract and query census variables at different geographical levels and in conjunction with their own data. In addition, the Census also contributes to some of our off-the-shelf data products. 

Although 2023 might seem a long way off to wait until the final Census 2021 outputs will be released, we recognise the importance of this data and the importance it will have in contributing to helping our clients make informed business decisions, and understanding how their customers were impacted by Covid-19. As a group of geographers, the Census has been a hot topic of conversation amongst the GMAP team and we hope you are as excited to fill in your 2021 Census as we are!