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Last updated

2 Oct 2025

Write-up from Scotland’s Census 2031 Topic consultation webinars

In September 2025, NRS hosted three online webinars for stakeholders as part of our topic consultation for Scotland's Census 2031. Each session focused on particular topic areas:

  • 10 September, 14:30-16:30: Ethnic group, national identity, language and religion, sexual orientation and trans status or history
  • 17 September, 11:30-13:30: Demography and migration, housing, UK armed forces veterans
  • 18 September, 14:00-16:00: Education, labour market and travel to work, health, disability and unpaid care

During these events, we gave a summary of the outputs produced from Scotland’s Census 2022 and heard from a number of external presenters who outlined the work they had done with Census 2022 data. We also gathered feedback from attendees on how they are currently using census data and how far this meets their needs.

We then moved on to discuss priorities for future census statistics and topics looking ahead to Census 2031.

Over the course of the three sessions we had 55 attendees. The slides from these events are available here.

Summary of Discussion from Topic consultation events

Use of 2022 Data

As part of these sessions, we asked attendees to provide information on how 2022 census data has been used. We learned that census data has been used across numerous organisations operating in different sectors for a broad range of practical applications, including but not limited to:

  • Area profiling by local authorities and other public sector organisations to enable targeted service provision.
  • Formulating the National Deaf Association Plan.
  • Analysis of how lifelong learning is evolving across Scotland.
  • Creating a dashboard on the demographic characteristics and geographic location of UK Armed Forces Veterans living in Scotland.
  • Building a picture of employment trends and broader labour market characteristics at local authority level.
  • Analysis on the provision of unpaid care across Scotland in order to monitor access to unpaid care and the unmet need for adult social care.
  • Creating local authority level estimates of the number of people with partial or full sight loss and extrapolating this information to create UK level estimates.
  • Identifying trends in how people across Scotland travel to work, notably the distance travelled and method of travel to work, to facilitate sustainable transport initiatives.
  • A wide range of multivariate census analysis, notably on how ethnicity interacts with other census topics such as economic activity and household deprivation.

Feedback on Census 2022 outputs

We also asked attendees to provide feedback on their experience of using the census 2022 outputs and any suggestions for improvements:

  • Attendees reported that they were broadly happy with the 2022 census outputs. Across the three sessions we learned that the range of options for accessing 2022 outputs (standard tables, flexible table builder, census maps, area profiles etc.) did well to meet the requirements of different individuals and organisations.
  • We received feedback that it would be useful to be able to combine more variables together in the flexible table builder, although it was acknowledged that this could potentially pose a statistical disclosure risk.
  • Several attendees also requested that the flexible table builder tool include functionality to specify geographies which sit within a higher level of geography, for example being able to specify all Intermediate Zones in a particular local authority.
  • We also received feedback that data users had sometimes encountered issues with building their own geographies, particularly when trying to combine small geographies such as Output Areas in the flexible table builder

Priorities for Scotland’s Census 2031

After the discussion on use of 2022 census data, we asked attendees to provide feedback on their priorities for Scotland’s Census 2031. We were particularly keen to hear suggestions for new topics for us to consider for inclusion in the next census. We received numerous suggestions including but not limited to:

 

  • Including a topic on income to capture household and/or individual income.
  • Expanding the language topic to capture more information on BSL users. Specifically whether they are deaf/hearing impaired or somebody who has hearing but can communicate in sign language.
  • Expanding the health topic to collect information on levels of physical activity and to capture whether or not respondents who have indicated that they have sight-loss are officially registered as sight impaired.
  • Including a topic on the asylum/refugee status of census respondents.
  • Expanding the qualifications topic to capture more information on education outside of formal qualifications.
  • Expanding the ethnicity topic to capture more detailed information on African ethnicities.
  • Collecting additional information on UK Armed Forces veterans to differentiate types of veterans (i.e. air, land sea). Also discussed the need to be able to have statistics on all those covered by the armed forces covenant which includes both veterans and their families.
  • Expansion of the unpaid care topic to capture more information on the relationships between care-providers and care-receivers as well as more information on whether care is provided within the household or to people living in another household.
  • Capturing information on “mixed mode” journeys as part of the travel to work/study topic. The question asked in Scotland’s census 2022 asked respondents to provide only their method of transport for the longest part of their journey to work or study.
  • We received numerous suggestions for new geographies to be made available for the 2031 census including Health & Social Care partnership geographies.