Whether it considers that it will be able to gather accurate statistics on the number of deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people by mean…

The aim of the proposed long-term health conditions question in the census is to gather statistics on the prevalence of certain broad types of condition in the population, rather than obtain exact numbers of those with very specific conditions. This means that health conditions have to be grouped into general categories for the response options in the question, such as deafness and partial hearing loss and blindness or partial sight loss. It will be possible to obtain accurate statistics on the number of deaf and hard of hearing as an overall category and also the number of people who responded to both the deafness and partial hearing loss and the blindness or partial sight loss categories.
Work is ongoing to develop a harmonised question to collect detailed information on disability groups through social surveys. Space is not as restricted in social surveys as it is in the census, which may provide an opportunity to collect more detailed information, on specific categories, in certain surveys. The major social surveys carried out by the Scottish Government have large sample sizes which allow for the provision of accurate, reliable information and can be used to provide population estimates.