Contains detailed statistics on adults and children registered, with councils with social services responsibilities in England, as being blind or partially sighted. The data are compiled from the triennial SSDA 902 return submitted by councils to the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).
People that have a Certificate of Vision Impairment from an ophthalmologist choose whether or not to be included in their local authority’s register of blind or partially sighted people; registration is not automatic. Those that register become eligible for certain concessions. This means that not everybody that has been certified as having a vision impairment is recorded on a local authority register. In addition, some local authorities have informed us that there are difficulties in providing some elements of these data. For these reasons the data in this publication cannot be considered as definitive numbers of blind and partially sighted people.
