Population and Society

Our Population and Society domain covers statistics on the size, composition and geographic spread of the population, and on people’s lifestyles and culture, including sport, language, and identity.

Our goal is to make sure that data and statistics are trustworthy, of sufficient quality and value to reliably support public debate and inform decision making for a wide range of stakeholders.

We are conducting assessments of the English and Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish Censuses, produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Our assessments have been conducted in three phases.

In October 2019, we published our report on Phase One, focusing on the planning and consultation activities undertaken by the Census offices across the UK. In November 2021, we published our Phase Two Assessment reports, focusing on the strategies for developing and providing outputs for both the England & Wales Census 2021 and the Northern Ireland Census 2021. For the Scotland Census 2022, our Phase Two Assessment report was published in April 2023.

In 2024, we published our third and final Phase Three reports for Northern Ireland in February 2025 and for England and Wales in June 2025. We will start Phase Three of 2022 Census in Scotland in Autumn 2025.

We continue to engage with producers of statistics on developments to transform population statistics across the UK.  As part of this work in 2024, we published the first phase of our assessment of the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) Admin-Based Population Estimates (ABPE’s). ONS wrote to us in July 2025 with an update on the progress it has made in response to our requirements. Our response letter details our view and highlights areas where further work is required. We also continue to engage with ONS on its transformation of international migration statistics while the team work towards further developing its outputs.

In May 2025, we published our review of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. We will continue to engage with the Gambling Commission regarding planned improvements to these statistics.

In May 2025, we started a compliance review of NISRA’s tourism statistics. We are assessing whether they should be reaccredited as Accredited Official Statistics (AOS), after their suspension in 2020. We hope to publish our findings on this in the autumn.

In our wider work in the domain, we published our review of gender identity estimates for England and Wales from Census 2021 and continue to engage with ONS on this important topic.

Our regulators for this domain are Isaac, Vicky, Gemma, Emma and Adele. You can contact them via regulation@statistics.gov.uk for more information or any queries.

Planned Work

Published Correspondence – Population and society domain

Publications – Population and society domain