Description
Travel to Work Area was developed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) working with Newcastle University to define a set of Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) for the whole of the UK.
Travel to Work Area is based on the address of the claimant.
Available breakdowns within this hierarchy are Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) and the National Level (GB).
Classification
Applicable to: all claimants.
The ordering and presentation of Travel to Work Area (TTWA) has been determined by ONS Geography and further guidance can be found here.
By TTWA
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.