Who sees your information
Access to personal census information is tightly controlled and we keep the number of people who see your information to a minimum. All National Records of Scotland (NRS) staff who have access to personal census information have had security clearance checks.
Staff who see your questionnaire
After you have returned your questionnaire it is passed to the local census field office, where it is checked to make sure you have filled in all the questions. It is then sent to our data processing centre.
All our field staff:
- are security cleared
- have given us a Disclosure Scotland certificate (a check for any previous criminal convictions)
- are given security awareness training, and
- are made fully aware of the importance of safeguarding personal census information and have signed a declaration to confirm they understand.
Processing the questionnaires
Paper questionnaires are scanned at our processing centre.
Everyone working at the processing centre is security cleared.
What happens to the results
To make sure that our published statistics do not reveal personal information, especially those that may reflect a neighbourhood, we use a process called ‘statistical disclosure control’.
This may involve:
- modifying some of the data before the statistics are released – by randomly swapping some records in one area with similar records in another
- merging the figures for one area with the figures for a neighbouring area, if the number of households or people in it fall below a minimum
- restricting the level of detail in a table of figures, for example by combining age groups
Personal records that identify you will only be published after being kept confidential for 100 years.
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