2011 Census General Report

The 2011 Census General Report, which was laid before Parliament on 4th March 2015, summarises the entire census operation spanning ten years, from the early consultation, legislation and planning stages, through the field activities and data processing - including the data capture and coding of questionnaires and the full adjustment of census counts - to the production and dissemination of outputs, and the key lessons learned, which will be taken forward for the 2021 Census.

Readers may be surprised by the details of what has been described as the largest peacetime operation carried out in the country: the recruitment, training and payment of 35,000 temporary field staff and the postal delivery of 25 million questionnaires. The 2011 Census included new approaches to census taking such as the creation of a national address register, questionnaire tracking,online census and online help. It also included an innovative national publicity campaign backed by a local authority and community liaison programme. Online publishing has made the 2011 Census more accessible to everyone and has enabled data to be presented through the use of infographics and data visualisation, resulting in the publication of 600 datasets with over 8 billion cells of data.

Each chapter is presented as a Pdf download and the report can also be downloaded in full. The Foreword and Executive Summary have been translated into Welsh and are also available to download.