Major updates to local authority ward data

This page first posted 24 April 2020, revised 1 July 2020

To keep our electoral geography up to date, Electoral Calculus has completed a major update of its local authority data. Since our last update in 2015, there have been many changes to local council areas, ward boundaries and four year of local election results.

These changes have now been incorporated in our datasets, and are now visible on the website. Maps and ward details now show council ward boundaries as at 2019, and the most recent local election results are used to help infer the general election result in each ward.

Local government changes include the creation of five new councils ('Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole', Dorset, East Suffolk, West Suffolk, and 'Somerset West and Taunton', and the abolition of 14 councils which lay within the newly created councils.

Additionally, one hundred councils in England and Scotland have had their ward boundaries redrawn by the relevant authorities since 2015. Altogether around 2,800 (30pc) of the 9,200 wards in the UK have been changed in one way or another. These new wards and their boundaries are now included in the Electoral Calculus analysis and maps.

Our thanks to all those people and organisations who have helped with the local election results data. In particular, to Andrew Teale and his Local Elections Archive Project, Democracy Club (UK results), and the many contributors to Wikipedia's local election results pages.

We are also grateful to those official bodies who have made data available: all 382 local authorities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; Office of National Statistics; Ordnance Survey; Local Government Boundary Commission for England; Electoral Commission; Scottish Government Statistics; National Records of Scotland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; Electoral Office of Northern Ireland.

Overall the project required around 1.2GB of data split over 1,600 files, thirty spreadsheets, eleven database tables and seven programming languages.

Site visitors are now able to

• Have their ward (as at 2019) identified from their postcode
• See, for any ward, its:
  • key census demographics, such as health, class, age, education
  • inferred EU referendum result
  • 3D-Political position, on the economic, national and social axes
  • inferred general election results for 2019, 2017 and 2015
• For any seat, see the 2019 general election result broken down by all its constituent wards
• Data mapping showing all up-to-date wards across the country in a browsable and zoomable map along with their political and demographic characteristics

Upgrade to Wards 2020 for Parliamentary Boundary Review

A new update to our electoral geography has upgraded the wards used to be the latest wards in force for 2020. The reason for this is that these are expected to be the wards used as the basis for the upcoming review of parliamentary seat boundaries.

The current draft legislation, the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill 2019-21 (text) instructs the four Boundary Commissions (one each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to conduct new parliamentary boundary reviews with a "review date" of 1 December 2020, and to complete the review before 1 July 2023.

The new parliamentary seats will be made up of, as much as possible, by joining together groups of (entire) local authority wards. This makes the local authority wards an important part of the new seat boundary process, so Electoral Calculus needs to use the same wards as the boundary commissions.

An innovation in the bill is that the wards to be used are the "local government boundaries which exist, or are prospective, on the review date". This means that the wards used will be similar to the wards of 2020, but will include wards which will change in the next couple of years.

As a first step, the Electoral Calculus electoral data has been upgraded to work with the wards of 2020. These "Wards 2020" are similar to the earlier "Wards 2019" which were incorporated in April, but include changes to these local authorities: Basingstoke and Deane, Buckinghamshire, Cambridge, Chorley, Halton, Hartlepool, Oxford, Pendle, Rotherham, Salford and Stroud. The new unitary authority of Buckinghamshire abolishes the previous district councils of Aylesbury Vale, Chiltern, South Bucks and Wycombe. There are a total of 303 new local authority wards.

An additional complication is that the local elections of 2020 were postponed for a year due to the coronavirus outbreak. This means that there were no, and never have been, local elections in those new wards of 2020. Electoral Calculus has used models to infer the likely result of earlier local elections in those new wards.

Using those data, it is possible to infer the likely result of the December 2019 general election in every ward of 2020. This will be useful when the Boundary Commissions report, in terms of predicting the political composition of each new seat.

Until then, site visitors are now able to:

• Have their ward (as at 2020) identified from their postcode
• See, for any ward (as at 2020), its:
  • key census demographics, such as health, class, age, education
  • inferred EU referendum result
  • 3D-Political position, on the economic, national and social axes
  • inferred party winner at the general elections of 2019, 2017 and 2015
• For any seat, see the 2019 general election result and current prediction broken down by all its constituent wards (as at 2020)
• Data mapping showing all wards across the country in a browsable and zoomable map along with their political and demographic characteristics. The map can switch between the wards of 2020, the wards of 2019 and the wards of 2015 to enable changes to be seen.