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

Currently there appears to be limited demand for statistics at ITL2 or ITL3 level. As a result, the Scottish Government currently publishes very little data at these geographical levels.

Following the departure of the UK from the European Union, the UK is no longer required to provide statistics to the European Union and is no longer eligible for EU Structural and Investment Funds. For this reason, demand for statistics using the ITL geography has declined.

The UK remains a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As a requirement of this membership, the ONS submits UK wide economic statistics to the OECD using the ITL geographies. These include statistics related to a range of topic areas including economic, demographic, labour force and education statistics. These statistics are published on the OECD’s Data Explorer. Currently, the difficulty of producing some statistics due to the non-alignment of ITL boundaries with local authorities prevents ONS from submitting some variables.

Outside of these international commitments, a small number of Scottish Government statistical publication currently use the ITL geographies. For example, National Records of Scotland publish mid-year population estimates using ITL geographies, and ITLs will be included in Census 2022 outputs published later in 2024. Some agricultural statistics are also produced using ITL regions, such as annual cereal and oilseed rape harvest estimates.

The Office for National Statistics also uses ITL geography when producing UK wide statistics on policy areas reserved to the UK Government. In this case the ITL geography facilitates comparisons between regions within the UK.