Method of travel to workplace (13 categories)

Description: A person's place of work and their method of travel to work. This is the 2001 method of producing travel to work variables.

"Work mainly from home" applies to someone who indicated their place of work as their home address and travelled to work by driving a car or van, for example visiting clients.

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.

People who were furloughed (about 5.6 million) were advised to answer the transport to work question based on their previous travel patterns before or during the pandemic. This means that the data does not accurately represent what they were doing on Census Day. This variable cannot be directly compared with the 2011 Census Travel to Work data as it does not include people who were travelling to work on that day. It may however, be partially compared with bespoke tables from 2011.

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.