MPS Household file specification

The MPS Household file is extracted from the Personal file but only contains one entry per household where the surname matches. A 'household' is defined as an exact match in every addess element.. The file doesn't include any prefix or forename information. 'The Date of Request' field will be that of the earliest entry in any household matching a particular surname.

The 'X' category (Deceased) remains at an 'individual' level and includes Prefix and Initial.

Because the Personal file has increased many of the field lengths, any entries which are too long for the Household format file will be truncated.

The change from 'R' (remove) to 'P' in field 1 is to show that the record, although at household level in this file, was extracted from the personal file. This distinguishes records from those in the Original file which will have an 'R' for remove.

It is only available for 1 year from the introduction of the MPS Changes (October 2007) and is designed to allow licencees to continue using the old style file format if required whilst updating IT systems and procedures to use the new 'Personal' format.

Inclusion Categories - These are being discontinued from the introduction of the personal registration file. To maintain a consistent number of fields between the original and personal file formats fields 3 and 4 will remain in the file but have blank entries.

The X (deceased) records have always been registered at personal level but by Initial or Initials only rather than full forename. The recent MPS changes do not affect deceased records so these will retain initials in the Initial field.

There are two data file formats - Fixed format and Ascii Comma Delimited.

The file layouts are illustrated below.

The above record format pertains to the Fixed format data file. The Ascii comma separated format will follow the sequence above with the maximum length indicated by the 'Length' column. The individual fields will be 'text qualified' with a double quote character (").