A nationwide census, commonly known as Census 2001, was conducted in the United Kingdom on Sunday, 29 April 2001. This was the 20th UK Census.
Census 2001 was organised by the Office for National Statistics in England and Wales, the General Register Office for Scotland and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. Detailed results by region, council area, ward and output area are available from their respective websites.
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The results from the 2001 census were produced using a methodology known as the One Number Census.[1] This was an attempt to adjust the census counts and impute answers to allow for estimated under-enumeration measured by the Census Coverage Survey (sample size 370,000 households), resulting in a single set of population estimates.
The 2001 census was the first in Great Britain to ask about the religion of respondents. A new law was passed by parliament to allow the question to be asked, and to allow the response to this question to be optional.
It is sometimes claimed that Census 2001 revealed that one-third of the population of Wales described themselves as of Welsh nationality.[2] In fact, the 2001 census did not collect any information on nationality. Controversy surrounding the classification of ethnic group began as early as 2000, when it was revealed that respondents in Scotland and Northern Ireland would be able to check a box describing themselves as Scottish or Irish, an option not available for Welsh respondents.[3][4] Prior to the Census, Plaid Cymru backed a petition calling for the inclusion of a Welsh tickbox and for the National Assembly of Wales to have primary law-making powers and its own National Statistics Office.[3] With an absence of a Welsh tickbox, the only other tickbox available was "white-British", "Irish", or "other".[2][3]
For the first time in a UK Census, those wishing to describe their ethnicity as Cornish were given their own code number (06) on the 2001 UK Census form, alongside those for people wishing to describe themselves as English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish. About 34,000 people in Cornwall and 3,500 people in the rest of the UK wrote on their census forms in 2001 that they considered their ethnic group to be Cornish.[5] This represented nearly 7% of the population of Cornwall and is therefore a significant phenomenon.[6] Although happy with this development, campaigners expressed reservations about the lack of publicity surrounding the issue, the lack of a clear tick-box for the Cornish option on the census and the need to deny being British in order to write "Cornish" in the field provided. The UK government has agreed recently that English and Welsh will have an ethnicity tick box on the Census 2011 but there will be no Cornish option tick box. Various Cornish organisations are campaigning for the inclusion of the Cornish tick box on the next 2011 Census.[7][8]
| Preceded by 1991 |
UK Census 2001 |
Succeeded by 2011 |
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