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Occasional Paper

Scotland's Census 2001 - Statistics on Travel to Work or Study

Comparisons with 1991

While the 1991 Census included a similar travel question to the one asked in 2001, there were two major differences between the information collected in the two Censuses:

• The question in 2001 asked for the address of a person’s place of work or study (see section “People travelling to a place of work or study” in Definitions) while, in 1991, the equivalent question only asked for the address of a person’s place of work.  Therefore, while students could still be identified in the 1991 Census, information was not collected on where they actually studied.

• Place of work/study addresses were coded for all Census records in 2001, but the equivalent exercise for workplace addresses in 1991 was only done for 10% of records.

While these factors make comparison over time difficult, Table 17 does provides some travel information from 1991.  The main points of interest are:

• 59 per cent of the population in 1991 worked or studied, lower than the figure of 64 per cent in 2001.

• In 1991, the remaining 41 per cent of people did not work or study.  This figure was highest in Glasgow City (50 per cent) and lowest in Aberdeenshire (33 per cent).  While the Glasgow City figure was much higher than its 2001 equivalent (42 per cent), at least part of this difference may be explainable by the fact that, in 1991, students were enumerated at their home address and not their term-time address.  As a result, many students at Glasgow educational institutes who stayed in the city during term-time would have been enumerated as living outside the city.

• Just over 2 per cent of the population in 1991 worked at home – it was not possible to identify people who studied at home.  As with 2001 for workers/students, the highest proportion was in the Orkney Islands (9.8 per cent) - the lowest was in Glasgow City (0.6 per cent).

• A very small proportion of the population in 1991 (less than 0.1 per cent) worked outside the UK.  This was highest for residents of Highland.

• Of those Scottish residents who travelled to a place of work within Scotland in 1991, 23 per cent travelled to a different council area from the one they lived in.  This was the same as the figure, in 2001, for the proportion of those who worked or studied who crossed a council boundary.  However, it is worth pointing out that this proportion is higher in 2001 when we only look at people working but not studying (29 per cent), suggesting that the working population was more willing to travel larger distances to work in 2001 than in 1991.

• More than half (56 per cent) of workers travelling across council boundaries in 1991 travelled to a workplace in one of the four main city council areas.  This was similar to the proportion who travelled to a place of work or study in these areas in 2001 (53 per cent).

• 78 per cent of household residents who travelled to a place of work in 1991 lived in households with access to at least one car.  The equivalent figure for those who travelled to work or study in 2001 was higher, at 83 per cent.  For those working but not studying in 2001, this figure was even higher, at 86 per cent.