What I hadn’t anticipated at the time was how popular this approach would be – everyone was getting into GIS and wanted to work with small area data.
Confidentiality measures, however, meant that turkey rcs data a lot of that data still couldn’t be published within these output areas, so the ONS had the idea to use the same approach for something a bit bigger –‘super output areas’ to marry the needs of both confidentiality and small area outputs.
The ONS have said that the output areas, recoded from my original version, were one of the most successful innovations from the 2001 Census.
That success has meant that they have continued to be used for the 2011 and 2021 censuses. even proved their worth when monitoring the pandemic.
And all starting from the prototype I produced in 1996!
That’s an impressive contribution to the field – you changed the geography of the census!
Yes, I suppose you could say that.
If you look at any map of England, Wales or Northern Ireland census data (not Scotland, as they have their own system), what you’ll see is effectively the boundaries that my work on small output areas generated (albeit with lots of work from others along the way!)