A rolling programme of Census 2021 publications is well underway, with topic summaries being published regularly into January 2023, followed by data and analysis.

Where there is a critical and urgent need, we have been able to use preliminary census data to fill evidence gaps to inform policy throughout 2022. Census data have already helped local planning for Ukrainian refugees and informed understanding of occupational differentials in vaccine uptake during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Last month, we published preliminary univariate and multivariate estimates of selected population groups from Census 2021 to provide information on who may be vulnerable to rising costs of living in households in England.

On December 6 we published preliminary estimates of the number of households by type of central heating at output area level and above for England and Wales. This is to support the response by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to rising energy costs, specifically the Alternative Fuel Payment scheme.

On December 15, we published further data in support of this work.

The data are the best available at this point but have not yet been through all our census processing and quality assurance steps. Final estimates will be published next year and may differ slightly.

At all times, we have complied with important principles around proportionality, ethical oversight, security, and the need for regular reviews. All data produced have been anonymised and aggregated so no individuals or individual households are ever identifiable in any outputs we publish, in line with legislation and data protection regulations. To ensure confidentiality, and in line with our established policy on statistical disclosure control, numbers have been rounded to the nearest 5 and no counts of less than 10 have been published in this output.