Police Force Area Boundaries for England and Wales, December 2016

Digital vector boundaries for Police Force Areas in England and Wales, as of 31 December 2016. The dataset contains five boundary versions at different resolutions, from full resolution to ultra generalised (500m), and is provided by the Office for National Statistics. File sizes range from 105 KB for the ultra generalised version to 18 MB for the full resolution version clipped to the coastline.

Use Cases

• Map crime statistics based on the provided police force area boundaries.
• Conduct spatial joins for demographic analysis based on the generalised clipped boundaries.
• Create visualizations for public safety planning based on the full resolution extent of the realm boundaries.
• Integrate boundary data into GIS systems for regional analysis based on the multiple available resolutions.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions for different use cases, including full resolution and multiple generalised levels.
• Specific file sizes are listed for each version, with the smallest being 105 KB and the largest 18 MB.
• Contains intellectual property rights from both Ordnance Survey and the Office for National Statistics, indicating authoritative sources.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Data is specific to a single snapshot date (31 December 2016), limiting temporal analysis.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Time Range

As of 31 December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:30:51.074315; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England and Wales