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The reality of local politics and grant allocations requires that data sets are available for local authority wards current at the time of the data analysis. MSOAs are of no benefit for this purpose, LSOAs only so long as they continue to nest into wards.
There is also a desperate need to tweak Output Area boundaries so that they are recognisable on the ground: that they run along the centre of roads and streams, face of fences and walls, between boundary stones, etc. This is for the most part technically achievable: the anomalous parts of OAs generally contain no residential properties; anomalous OA boundaries rarely pass through them. Snapping to physical features in this way would be worth the effort (if not the spurious expense of commercial charges by Ordnance Survey and the Royal Mail) and would greatly increase the acceptability of census data to general users.
