Police Force Area Boundaries for England and Wales, December 2016

December 2016 digital vector boundaries for Police Force Areas in England and Wales. The dataset contains multiple boundary resolutions, from full resolution to ultra generalised (500m), all clipped to the coastline. It is provided by the Office for National Statistics and contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Mapping police jurisdictions based on the provided vector boundaries.
• Analyzing the geographic extent of police force areas based on the coastline-clipped boundaries.
• Performing spatial joins with other UK datasets using the super generalised (200m) boundaries for efficiency.
• Creating visualizations of administrative geography using the multiple available resolutions.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary resolutions, including super generalised (200m) and ultra generalised (500m) versions.
• Contains specific file size information for each resolution, such as the 337 KB super generalised file.
• Includes direct REST service URLs for ArcGIS INSPIRE View and Feature Download services.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is specific to a single snapshot date (31 December 2016); freshness should be verified for current applications.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Likely digitized from official administrative records.

Time Range

As at 31 December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:31:03.700128; temporal coverage is for December 2016.

Geography

England and Wales