Creating a linked consumer register for granular demographic analysis

A very large share of the adult population frequently assent to provide data on their place of residence to local governments and businesses when registering for or acquiring goods and services. When linked together, such data can provide highly granular inventories of local populations and their characteristics on far faster refresh cycles than conventional statistical sources. However, each of the constituent sources of data is of largely unknown provenance. We describe how careful curation, linkage and analysis of sources of consumer and administrative data can resolve many questions of content and coverage, resulting in comprehensive, highly disaggregate and frequently updateable representations of population structure, along with reliable estimates of incompleteness and possible bias. We link 20 consecutive annual public UK registers of electors to a range of sources of consumer data to create annual updates to a longitudinal profile of the adult residents of almost every domestic property. We illustrate the applicability and value of the resulting unique data resource through the derivation of an annual small area household change index. We also assess the prospects of other, related, data linkage projects.