Informing policy making: New approaches to analysing the 2001 census

This article demonstrates how the Samples of Anonymised Records (SARs) and Customised Output from the 2001 UK Population Census can be used to supplement existing sets of information and data sources available to central and local government. It argues that these data sources can provide an important asset for policy making and resource allocation in local government. The SARs from the 1991 Census could be used to gain a provisional evaluation and operational experience before the release of the 2001 dataset. This approach is applied to the analysis of housing need to provide an illustrative example.