Other information

Coverage

England and Wales

Units

Households

Keywords

Occupancy rating,Bedrooms

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About this dataset

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify households in England and Wales by occupancy rating based on the number of bedrooms in the household. 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

Occupancy rating for bedrooms (6 categories)

Description: Whether a household's accommodation is overcrowded, ideally occupied or under-occupied. This is calculated by comparing the number of bedrooms the household requires to the number of available bedrooms.

The number of bedrooms the household requires is calculated according to the Bedroom Standard, where the following should have their own bedroom:

    1. adult couple
    1. any remaining adult (aged 21 years or over)
    1. two males (aged 10 to 20 years)
    1. one male (aged 10 to 20 years) and one male (aged 9 years or under), if there are an odd number of males aged 10-20
    1. one male aged 10-20 if there are no males aged 0-9 to pair with him.
    1. repeat steps 3-5 for females
    1. two children (aged 9 years or under) regardless of sex
    1. any remaining child (aged 9 years or under)

An occupancy rating of:

  • -1 or less: implies that a household's accommodation has fewer bedrooms than required (overcrowded)
  • +1 or more: implies that a household's accommodation has more bedrooms than required (under-occupied)
  • 0: suggests that a household's accommodation has an ideal number of bedrooms

    Comparability with 2011: Highly comparable

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