The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Stephen Penneck, dated 26 January 2010:
As Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your request to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what changes have been made to the mechanisms by which information on marital status has been collected by the Office for National Statistics since 1997. (313090)
Information on marital status can be broadly separated into information that provides estimates of the population by marital status at a given point in time (‘stocks’), and information on the movement of people between different marital status categories over a given period of time (‘flows’). Both types of information are collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) through a variety of sources, and both types of information are used to calculate population estimates and projections by marital status. For most statistics on marital status, ONS currently publishes statistics for England and Wales only.
With regard to both stocks and flows, the main change since 1997 in the collection of information on marital status has been the introduction of civil partnerships. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The Act enables same-sex couples aged 16 and over to obtain legal recognition of their relationship. Other than this change, the collection of information on marital status has remained largely unchanged since 1997.
The main mechanisms for the collection of data on stock estimates by marital status are social surveys and censuses. Following the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act, questions in ONS social surveys (such as the Annual Population Survey) have been changed to allow the collection of information on the currently and previously civil partnered population. Information on revised survey questions is available in the following document:
“Harmonised Concepts and Questions for Social Data Sources: Primary Standards—Demographic information, household composition and relationships”
www.ons.gov.uk/about-statistics/harmonisation/primary-concepts-and-questions/P2.pdf
The main mechanism for the collection of data on changes in marital status (flows) is the registration of vital events. Data on birth, death, marriage and civil partnership registrations are collected by the General Register Office (GRO), which supplies data to ONS for statistical purposes. Similarly, data on divorces and civil partnership dissolutions are supplied to ONS by the HM Court Service.
The main change in marital status vital event registration since 1997 has been the collection of data on the formation and legal dissolution of civil partnerships. In addition, changes have been made to the registration of deaths (to identify deaths of the currently and previously civil partnered population) and the registration of births by parents’ marital status (related to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act). Information on civil partnerships is available at the link below.
www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=1685