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Provision of unpaid care, age-standardised proportions

Summary

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents aged 5 years and over in England and Wales by the number of hours of unpaid care they provide. The estimates are as at Census Day, 21 March 2021. Age-standardisation allows for comparisons between populations that may contain proportions of different ages, represented as a percentage.

Variable and dataset information

Area type

Census 2021 statistics are published for a number of different geographies. These can be large, for example the whole of England, or small, for example an output area (OA), the lowest level of geography for which statistics are produced.

For higher levels of geography, more detailed statistics can be produced. When a lower level of geography is used, such as output areas (which have a minimum of 100 persons), the statistics produced have less detail. This is to protect the confidentiality of people and ensure that individuals or their characteristics cannot be identified.

Lower Tier Local Authorities

Lower tier local authorities provide a range of local services. In England there are 309 lower tier local authorities. These are made up of non-metropolitan districts (181), unitary authorities (59), metropolitan districts (36) and London boroughs (33, including City of London). In Wales there are 22 local authorities made up of 22 unitary authorities. Of these local authority types, only non-metropolitan districts are not additionally classified as upper tier local authorities.

Coverage

Census 2021 statistics are published for the whole of England and Wales. However, you can choose to filter areas by:

  • country - for example, Wales
  • region - for example, London
  • local authority - for example, Cornwall
  • health area – for example, Clinical Commissioning Group
  • statistical area - for example, MSOA or LSOA

Unpaid care

An unpaid carer may look after, give help or support to anyone who has long-term physical or mental ill-health conditions, illness or problems related to old age.

This does not include any activities as part of paid employment.

This help can be within or outside of the carer's household.

Variables

Population type
All usual residents
Area type
Lower Tier Local Authorities
Coverage
England and Wales
Unpaid care
5 Categories
  • Provides no unpaid care
  • Provides 19 or less hours unpaid care a week
  • Provides 20 to 49 hours unpaid care a week
  • Provides 50 or more hours unpaid care a week
  • Does not apply

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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

Read more in Section 5 of our article Design for Census 2021.

Version history

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