Changing the International Territorial Level Geography for Scotland: Island Communities Impact Assessment

The International Territorial Levels (ITLs) are geographic boundaries used in the production of statistics in the United Kingdom. They were created by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to produce regional statistics within the UK, and to allow international comparisons.

The Office for National Statistics is proposing to update these geographic boundaries for the entirety if the UK. The Scottish Government has consulted on proposals for Scotland, and the outcome of the consultation has informed our recommendations to ONS.

The proposals are driven by two main considerations. Firstly, they propose to align ITL boundaries to local authority boundaries in Scotland. This will make it easier to produce statistics using ITL boundaries. Currently, where data does not align with local authorities, producing ITL statistics can be challenging for some topics where data might not be produced at a local level. This makes it difficult to produce statistics for higher level geographies where lower level ‘building blocks’ are not available. This means statistics cannot be produced, or estimates must be created which introduce uncertainty. In addition, having non-standard geographies can present risks around disclosure, as it may be possible to identifying statistics for small areas by subtracting or ‘differencing’ statistics produced for two similar geographical levels.

In contrast, given that data is widely available at local authority level across a wide range of topics covered by Scottish Government, aligning boundaries with aggregations of local authorities make statistical production straightforward in most cases.

Secondly, we propose to alter ITL regions so that populations are more balanced. This will ensure that comparisons made between ITL regions are more meaningful. To do this we propose reducing the number of ITL3 regions from 23 to 18, and increasing the number of ITL2 regions from 5 to 6. The proposals will mean the ITL regions align more closely with the design specifications for these geographies.