Country of birth and occupation (current)
As Census 2021 was during a unique period of rapid change, take care when using Labour Market data for planning purposes. We advised users that two occupation classifications “5221 Metal forming, welding and related trades” and “5222 Tool makers, tool fitters and markers out” were incorrectly coded to “521 Metal forming, welding and related trades”. These should have been coded to “522 Tool makers, tool fitters and markers-out”. We also advised users that two occupation classifications “2211 Generalist medical practitioners” and “2212 Specialist medical practitioners” were incorrectly coded to “21 Science, research, engineering and technology professionals”. These should have been coded to “22 Health professionals”. These were corrected on 17 July 2023.
Read more about this quality notice.
Summary
This dataset provides 2021 Census estimates that classify all usual residents in England and Wales by country of birth and occupation (current). The estimates are as at census day, 21 March 2021.
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.
England and Wales
Data for both England and Wales.
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
Country of birth
The country in which a person was born.
For people not born in one of the four countries of the UK or the Republic of Ireland, there was an option to select "elsewhere".
People who selected "elsewhere" were asked to write in the current name for their country of birth.
Occupation (current)
Classifies what people aged 16 years and over do as their main job. Their job title or details of activities they do in their job and any supervisory or management responsibilities form this classification. This information is used to code responses to an occupation using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020.
It classifies people who were in employment between 15 March and 21 March 2021, by the SOC code that represents their current occupation.
The lowest level of detail available is the four-digit SOC code which includes all codes in three, two and one digit SOC code levels.
Variables
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Contact us
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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Dataset link
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