Changing the International Territorial Level geography for Scotland: consultation

Current ITL Regions in Scotland

The ITL geographies were created by the Office for National Statistics following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and are a replacement for the Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS) geographies, maintained by Eurostat.

The specification for the ITL geographies is designed to align with the previous NUTS specification, allowing statistics to continue to be compared internationally.

More information on ITLs is available on the Office for National Statistics website.

The ITL geography is a hierarchical geography with three levels. The ITL1 level is the highest level of the ITL geography and the whole of Scotland is an ITL1 region. ITL levels 2 and 3 are sub-divisions of Scotland. The ITL2 geography currently divides Scotland into five regions, and the ITL3 geography divides Scotland into 23 regions. The current ITL regions are shown in figure 2 and figure 3 below.

To enable the geography to be internationally comparable, the 3 ITL layers are designed so that the population that lives within each region falls within specified population thresholds. This is to ensure that regions at each ITL level are broadly comparable. The thresholds for ITLs have been selected so that they continue to align with NUTS. These population thresholds are shown in figure 1:

In addition, ITLs are designed to align with existing NUTS requirements that existing administrative boundaries are respected as far as possible. In the UK, this typically means aligning to local authority boundaries.