Dwellings by Occupancy rating of bedrooms by Religion of household reference person by Type of central heating in household (Middle Super Output Areas in England and Wales) 2011

Dataset population: Households

Dwellings

A household's accommodation (a household space) is defined as being in a shared dwelling if it has accommodation type 'part of a converted or shared house', not all the rooms (including bathroom and toilet, if any) are behind a door that only that household can use and there is at least one other such household space at the same address with which it can be combined to form the shared dwelling.

If any of these conditions are not met, the household space forms an unshared dwelling. Therefore a dwelling can consist of one household space (an unshared dwelling) or two or more household spaces (a shared dwelling).

Occupancy rating (bedrooms)

Occupancy rating provides a measure of whether a household's accommodation is overcrowded or underoccupied. There are two measures of occupancy rating: One based on the number of rooms in a household's accommodation, and one based on the number of bedrooms.

The ages of the household members and their relationships to each other are used to derive the number of rooms/bedrooms they require, based on a standard formula. The number of rooms/bedrooms required is subtracted from the number of rooms/bedrooms in the household's accommodation to obtain the occupancy rating. An occupancy rating of -1 implies that a household has one fewer room/bedroom than required, whereas +1 implies that they have one more room/bedroom than the standard requirement.

Religion of HRP

This is a person's current religion, or if the person does not have a religion, 'No religion'. No determination is made about whether a person was a practicing member of a religion. Unlike other census questions where missing answers are imputed, this question was voluntary, and where no answer was provided the response is categorised as 'Not stated'.

The concept of a Household Reference Person (HRP) was introduced in the 2001 Census (in common with other government surveys in 2001/2) to replace the traditional concept of the 'head of the household'. HRPs provide an individual person within a household to act as a reference point for producing further derived statistics and for characterising a whole household according to characteristics of the chosen reference person.

Type of central heating

A household's accommodation is classified as having central heating if it is present in some or all rooms (whether used or not). Central heating is classified by type, as shown in the classification table. Other central heating includes solar, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) or other bottled gas. This information is not available for household spaces with no usual residents.