You asked
I would like the census returns from 1921 to this present day to be released for the purpose of family history.
We said
Thank you for your request.
In line with government policy, relevant legislation and the promise of confidentiality, personal census data is not released until 100 years after the census in question. This helps to protect personal information about people still living, whose information was recorded on these historic censuses. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
For administrative purposes, the date of the records is calculated at the end of the year and not from the dates of individual sensitive records. Personal data from the 1921 Census will, therefore, be made available to the public in early 2022 and will be accessible through Findmypast.