2001 Census: Special Licence Household SAR
The Special Licence Household SAR (SL- HSAR) is a 1 per cent sample of households and all those individuals in those households from the 2001 Census. It is a hierarchical file allowing linkages to be made between individuals within families and households. The Special Licence Household SAR contains information on age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, social class, education and employment status. It also includes household level variables, e.g. housing tenure and number of cars. A number of derived variables have been added, for example, the number of full time earners in a household or the age of the youngest dependent child in a household.
The 2001 Special Licence Household SAR is available for England and Wales only. It comprises 225436 household records and 525715 individual records. Individual records are available only for households with 11 or fewer residents. Household records include a small number of empty households. For households of 12 or over, only household level variables are available – there are no individual records. To protect confidentiality age has been grouped into two-year bands and there is no geographical breakdown available. There has been a small amount of perturbation to protect confidentiality.
Whilst the actual numbers of individuals and households are relatively small, large households are not randomly distributed in the population. For example, the loss of this information would disproportionately affect Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups and would bias estimates of overcrowding and various forms of deprivation.
The sample excludes those in communal establishments. It includes households with dummy forms and also ‘students living-away’ who provide very limited individual information because they should be fully enumerated at their usual term-time residence.The variable ‘popbase’ allows users to identify these categories and select their required population base. The file was sampled from the ‘one-number census’ database. This includes data which was imputed for non-respondent individuals or households. Imputed cases can be identified using the “oncperim” variable.
A Controlled Access Microdata version (CAMS) of the Household SAR is also available and this contains data for Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as England and Wales. As with the Individual CAMS file, potential users should make an application to ONS to use the data at one of their sites.
