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Coverage

England and Wales

Units

Persons

Keywords

Married,Separated,Divorced,Widowed

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About this dataset

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents aged 16 years and over in England and Wales by their legal partnership status. The estimates are as at Census Day, 21 March 2021.

National Park data are created by plotting unique properties as identified by their Unique Property Reference Number or postcodes into National Park boundaries current at December 2022. This differs from the OA best fit methodology used for other geographic level data.

Protecting personal data

Sometimes we need to make changes to data if it is possible to identify individuals. This is known as statistical disclosure control. In Census 2021, we:

  • Swapped records (targeted record swapping), for example, if a household was likely to be identified in datasets because it has unusual characteristics, we swapped the record with a similar one from a nearby small area. Very unusual households could be swapped with one in a nearby local authority.
  • Added small changes to some counts (cell key perturbation), for example, we might change a count of four to a three or a five. This might make small differences between tables depending on how the data are broken down when we applied perturbation.

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About the variables

Legal partnership status (18 categories)

Description: Classifies a person according to their legal marital or registered civil partnership status on Census Day 21 March 2021. It is the same as the 2011 census variable "Marital status" but has been updated for Census 2021 to reflect the revised Civil Partnership Act that came into force in 2019.

In Census 2021 results, "single" refers only to someone who has never been married or in a registered civil partnership.

Quality information: Separate estimates by opposite and same-sex partnerships for the marital status categories "Separated", "Divorced/dissolved" and "Widowed/surviving partners" are not available. This is because quality assurance showed the figures for some of the categories were unreliable.

Comparability with 2011: Broadly comparable. We have added the same-sex marriage and opposite-sex civil partnership status categories that have come in since 2011. Therefore, there are same-sex and opposite sex categories for those in a partnership. However, the same-sex and opposite-sex categories for legal partnership statuses outside of a partnership (people who are either separated, widowed, surviving partner, divorced or their partnership has legally been dissolved) have been collapsed together because of data quality issues.

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