You can get quite a lot of information about and data from the 2001 Census directly from the websites of the national census offices for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, you may find that detailed socio-demographic and geographic information is not available, and data from previous censuses cannot be obtained from these websites. You can also look at printed reports which may be in your local reference library, but these are not suitable for processing on a computer without considerable time being spent in entering data first. Fortunately there are other sources for accessing the data, which are identified in the rest of this overview unit.
NB: The data that are reported on in the remainder of this FAQ are freely
available, at the point of use, to UK Further and Higher Education users.
Users may have to register to use the data, through a simple online process.