Other information

Coverage

England and Wales

Units

Persons

Keywords

Ethnic group,Usual Resident

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About this dataset

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents in England and Wales by ethnic group. 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

Ethnic group (25 categories)

Description: The ethnic group that the person completing the census feels they belong to. This could be based on their culture, family background, identity or physical appearance. Respondents could choose one out of 19 tick-box response categories, including write-in response options.

Comparability with 2011: Broadly comparable. The question about the ethnic group people feel they belong to is self-identified and is subjectively meaningful to the person answering the question. This means that how a person chooses to identify can change over time. We have included a new Roma category next to the Gypsy or Irish Traveller tick-box within the White category. We have also added a write-in option for those selecting African within the Black, Caribbean or Black British category. This means that a more specific ethnic background could be recorded.

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Release calendar

Release DateStatusReference Period
There have been no releases.

Revisions and corrections

Date of revisionDates affectedComment
2022-11-29 11:30:002021Due to a data processing error, some of the values in this dataset were incorrectly labelled. This was corrected as of 11:30am on Tuesday 29 November 2022. This issue only affected the data on the Nomis website.
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