THE ESRC 2001 CENSUS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME, 1999-2001

The Census Development Programme was approved by ESRC Council in February 1999, with a funding line of £480K.
The intention is to fund about ten projects that carried out essential groundwork in anticipation of the 2001 Census.

Broad Aims

The Programme has the following broad aims:

• to put in place the data specifications, classifications and structures that will meet census user needs when linked to the 2001 Census of Population, and
• to put in place the tools for accessing, manipulating and analysing data sets from the 2001 Census of Population.

To achieve these broad aims, the programme has the following detailed objectives:

1. to develop a family of alternative household classifications
2. to investigate the feasibility of small area microdata
3. to create new datasets through linkage/fusion of census data to other data
4. either to specify new income indicators or to develop imputed measures of income
    (depending on whether the government decides to include an income question)
5. to contribute to the development of new census geographies for the whole UK
6. to develop time series of census data linked to the 2001 Census
7. to investigate methods of updating small area statistics after the 2001 Census
8. to produce improved interfaces to census area statistics
9. to create improved interfaces and tools for using census interaction data
10. to contribute to development of a flexible output statistics system.

Call for Proposals

This was issued in late March. Some 23 applications were received by the 11^th May, the due date.
There has been at least one application for each of the themes.

Commissioning of Projects

The Applications have been reviewed by a Commissioning Panel, which includes academics, Census Office representatives, local government and commercial sector census experts. The Commissioning Panel met in London on June 14 and selected the projects for funding. Applicants will be informed of the outcome by the end of June. The first projects will start in October 1999 and the last projects will have started by April 2000. Most projects will be a year in duration.

Programme Workshops

Between October 1999 and April 2001, four workshop meetings will be held. Investigators will make presentations of ideas and plans in the first workshop for late October 1999 to be held in London at the Royal Geographical Society. In the second workshop (May 2000 at the University of Leeds) and in the third workshop (November 2000 at the Royal Geographical Society, London), progress reports will be made. A final workshop is scheduled for April 2001 at University of Leeds, just before the Census itself, when final results will be presented.

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