Census Liaison Managers (CLM) & Assistant Census Liaison Managers (ACLM) monthly update for onward communication by CRCs April 2010 HEADLINES : i) Address check: May - August 2010 - ONS address checking fieldwork starts in the week commencing 3 May (following the forthcoming elections) and will help us to develop an accurate address register. The address check will employ some 360 staff for four months and will cover 3.6 million addresses in England and Wales (around 15 per cent of post codes). ii) Census local partnership plans :- we are continuing to develop guidance and an associated template to help with the step by step creation of census local partnership plans. Once we have taken on board the comments of the regional champions and members of the operational management and Central/Local Information partnership (CLIP) census advisory groups, we will consult all local authorities in late May. iii) Planning initial LA / Area Manager (AM) meeting: ONS will be contacting all CLMs and ACLMs (including county councils) for whom we have contact details, in May to reserve dates and meeting rooms for an initial meeting (planned for early August) between each area manager and the local authority/authorities they are responsible for. If we do not hold up-to-date contact details for your LA, please let Christopher.Dowsett@ons.gsi.gov.uk know ASAP. iv) Good response to request for community group lists: Following the request for community lists from Capita, we would like to thank the 153 local authorities who have submitted this information to date and those that have promised to do so. Please continue to send these lists if you have yet to do so as this will help us to encourage applications from field staff who are representative of your local community. v) Communal establishments. A separate list of communal establishments within England and Wales has been compiled from a variety of external data sources - and local authorities will be provided with an opportunity to add to this if they wish during the summer of 2010. Plans for this will be published shortly. In the meantime all known communal establishments in England and Wales will be address checked, though our approach to this will vary depending upon the type of establishment involved. Page 1 of 6
2011 Census community panels programme In response to lessons learned from the 2009 Census Rehearsal, ONS has set up a number of separate community panels for black and ethnic minority population groups. ONS is working with our diversity PR contractor, Linstock Communications, to run these. Initial meetings have taken place in London with each of the Somali, Bengali, Indian community and Black African communities. In Birmingham, panels have taken place so far for the Bengali, Chinese, Caribbean and Somali communities. The 2011 Census community engagement team (in conjunction with the special and general enumeration teams and the design authority) will use the advice from these community panels to develop: A general community plan setting out the enumeration, communication and liaison activities for each ethnic minority population group. These will be used by all area managers A bespoke local community plan for each of the top 10+ local authority areas for each ethnic minority population group to be implemented by community advisors. 2011 Census output consultation The consultation ran from the 14 December 2009 until the 26 March 2010 in accordance with the National Statistics Code of Practice. Its aim was to allow census users to contribute to the definition of the main body of outputs. Users were asked to comment on the specification whilst being free to add any additional requirements they wished including, new tables, geographies, derivations and classifications. The exercise was publicised widely and to-date responses from over seventy organisations have been received. Following the end of the consultation period, a number of requests were received for additional time to submit responses. As a result, the consultation team informally accepted late responses until the 16 April 2010. Feedback from the consultation has been positive with many users commenting on the usefulness and accuracy of the documentation. The next six months will be a key period in defining the outputs for the 2011 Census. The work will include analysis of the responses from the aforementioned consultation and will be used to define a second set of specifications. This second set will be used later in the year to complete a shorter second round of consultations. The next six months will also see a requirement gathering exercise for information on internal requirements within ONS, and a separate consultation on secondary population bases. Census communications The announcement of the General Election meant that we had to delay the start of our regular calendar of press releases. The first national release will now go out later in May. All ACLMs will receive copies at the same time as they go to the media. Despite the delay in the start of the national news schedule, our media monitoring system showed that a number of local newspapers carried very positive census stories in March on the one year to go theme. These were clearly the result of proactive work by some local authority ACLMs and communications teams using some of the material in the communications toolkit. Thank you to all those who made the effort - and well done for generating some excellent coverage. Page 2 of 6
We continue to build our local authority communications team email contact list and hope to have the draft list ready for testing and verification soon. If you have not already done so, we would appreciate your help by letting us have the name, job title, telephone number (if possible) and email address of the appropriate contact in your council s communications team. You can send the details to 2011censusLAcomms@ons.gsi.gov.uk Thank you to all those who have supplied us with details to date. Local authority/area Manager Initial Meeting Area managers take up post on 2nd August this year and will be hoping to meet their local authority(s) contacts - in particular the Assistant Census Liaison Manager - within their first fortnight. The prime objective of this first meeting is to discuss working together to ensure a successful census - with agreed local actions set out in a census local partnership plan (CLPP). We also hope that Census Liaison Managers and the LA communication team contact can attend this first meeting. If there are community advisors (CAs) working in your authority they will also attend these meetings where possible. ONS will be contacting ACLMs shortly to arrange these meetings. Following this first meeting, we're suggesting two further meetings between area managers and county, district and unitary councils between mid-august and mid-september. These meetings will focus on the development of the CLPP. Regular meetings between area managers and ACLMs will report on progress to the CLPP. We are also recommending that area managers (AMs) meet with other AMs and councils in their region and county on a regular basis to encourage joined up approaches. Address Checking ONS Address check field work starts in early May (following the elections) and ACLMs may be contacted by address check coordinators in the near future for local information and assistance with the following: Rooms for meetings with their field staff Parking permits where possible Information about high concentrations of households of multiple occupancy (HMOs) General intelligence about the local authority area (car parks, public toilets and so on) We would appreciate any assistance you can give them. There will be a phased approach to the address checking field work and so activity in some local areas wont commence until later in the summer. There are 31 address check coordinators and so they will cover multiple local authority areas. Choosing the address check areas The address check is being targeted using individual postcodes and is focused on those areas where we believe there is greatest uncertainty about the address list. Fifteen per cent of addresses in England and Wales are being checked. All residential and commercial addresses in the chosen postcodes will be checked. The majority of the postcodes (two thirds of those being checked) have been selected for checking because they contain the largest numbers of unmatched addresses between the main source products - the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) and the Postcode Address File. A further 4 per cent of England/Wales has been targeted using national data from the electoral roll and electricity meter suppliers. Where these sources identify multiple households behind one Royal Mail address, this is being Page 3 of 6
treated as a proxy for complexity of the address structure and we have picked those postcodes with the highest numbers of these. A final 1 per cent of postcodes have been selected randomly to help in the process of measuring the quality of the address list, of the check and of the source products. All local authorities (excluding the Isles of Scilly) will contain some postcodes to be checked. Although there will obviously be some clustering, the check postcodes are scattered across most local authorities and a rural address is just as likely to be checked as an urban one. Again, we are picking the most troublesome postcodes not the easiest to check and these appear in many different types of areas. Lists of the postcodes being checked are available for local authorities to download from the Improvement and Development Agency s 2011 Census Address Register Community of Practice. http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/1259927/home.do Recruitment Address check: For the address check posts, the following numbers of applications were received: address check coordinators (31 posts) = 3,370 applications (109:1) address checkers (approx 330 posts) = 16,627 applicants (51:1) We will be uploading details of local authority website referrals to the censusjob website onto the COP on a monthly basis. Communities of practice update We are creating a number of themes to help you find documents and manage discussions on the census communities of practice. All documents in the library of census communities have been assigned to themes and we will be creating further themes as necessary. Topic discussions on the forum will be themed shortly. Page 4 of 6
Quality assurance (QA) update Following the successful QA pilot, ONS is to invite a further forty additional local authorities to take part in a wider 'QA study' exercise. Areas invited are currently being identified using a similar analysis approach to that used in the selection of pilot area. Findings from the pilot will be published in May. Many of the lessons learnt from working with local authorities will be reported at a meeting to be held at the Royal Statistical Society in June. A wider update on the Census QA work will also be provided, including potential contingency methods. Such methods may need to be used for Census results that are inconsistent with results from the QA process. Improvements to the 2011 Census plans following the Rehearsal In light of the rehearsal findings, we are making improvements to our plans for 2011. The key changes are: Significant increase to the resources allocated to non response follow up (increase in collector numbers from 25,000 to 29,000) Putting a greater proportion of follow-up resources into those areas where we anticipate lower response rates. Increasing and better targeting of the resources for managing the field operation - both generally and in challenging areas (increasing the number of Area Managers from 118 to 157 and reducing the average number of staff a Coordinator manages from 15 to 12 in the more challenging areas). Increasing our advertising campaign budget. Page 5 of 6
Increasing our community engagement activities. We have set up a number of community panels to help us develop community plans for black and ethnic minority population groups. We are appointin additional community advisors to work with target population groups to raise their understanding and trust of the Census. Community advisors will begin work in August/September 2010 and will work closely with area managers and local authorities. Six things that you should do in May Read through the consultation draft guidance and template for census local partnership plans from late May If we haven't up-to-date contact details for your CLM/ACLM, please let Christopher.Dowsett@ons.gsi.gov.uk know ASAP Use own communication channels to provide publicity for address checking and census recruitment. Brief new councillors about the census and what it means to them, and send the councillor handbook to all your elected members. ACLMs meet with Address Check coordinators as appropriate to inform them about any addressing issues. Register on the CLM/ACLM communities of practice for latest updates and information. Only 60% of local authorities have signed up to this community Keeping in touch ONS will continue to produce monthly census updates and communicate these via the CRCs We have launched a new census website with dedicated sections for local authorities. Please visit http://www.census.gov.uk ONS will continue to upload relevant information, including these updates onto our 2011 Census Community of Practice for CLMs and ACLMs at http://www communities.idea.gov.uk/c/1265149/home.do We ask that you subscribe to this on-line community and use it to share ideas with ONS and local authority colleagues. We will continue to answer your questions on the communities and post FAQs We will update the local authority partnership guide on a frequent basis and notify what and when changes have been made Further information Ron May: Local authority liaison manager: ron.may@ons.gsi.gov.uk Neil Yemm: Local authority liaison officer: neil.yemm@ons.gsi.gov.uk Page 6 of 6