Field: National - Regional - LA - OAs
Description
There are many different geographical breakdowns available, some of which are made up of smaller geography types. For example, regions build up exactly into countries.
The Census Output Area 2011 (COA) hierarchy is built up from COA to the National Level based on the address of the claimant.
Available breakdowns within this hierarchy are Census Output Area, Lower Layer Super Output Area, Middle Layer Super Output Area, Local Authority, Region and Country.
Classification
Applicable to: all claims administered by DWP.
Total number of categories (excluding Unknown or missing):
By Country: 3
By Region: 11
By Local Authority: 351
A full list of codes and names relating to local authority areas can be obtained from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) website here.
We classify Unknown / Missing as ZZXXXXXXX and Abroad as XXZZZZZZZ
Quality Statement
Residency based geographies are derived from address information as recorded on the Customer Information System (CIS). CIS is a more reliable source of addresses as it links to all of the DWP benefit systems and contains the most up to date address for each individual.
These addresses are then put through a data cleansing procedure which makes sure postcodes are formatted correctly and the address fields are populated correctly. 2011 COAs are then assigned to claimants using the ONSPD (ONS Postcode Directory), starting with a direct postcode to COA lookup and then working through a logical allocation routine. These COAs are then used to merge on higher level geographies from the National Statistics Postcode Look-Up (NSPL).
All higher level geographies (Lower Layer Super Output Area/Data Zone, Middle Layer Super Output Area/Intermediate Zone, Local Authority, Region, Country) are derived from COA.