Ward to Local Authority District to County to Region to Country (December 2015) Lookup in

Office for National Statistics provides a lookup table mapping UK wards to higher administrative levels. This dataset defines the hierarchical relationships between wards, local authority districts, counties, regions, and countries as they were structured in December 2015. The data is licensed under the Open Government Licence for public sector information.

Use Cases

• Aggregating ward-level statistics to district or county levels based on the hierarchical mapping.
• Joining datasets with ward identifiers to add higher-level region or country labels.
• Analyzing changes in administrative boundaries over time by comparing this 2015 snapshot to other years.
• Creating choropleth maps or other geospatial visualizations using consistent administrative units.

Strengths

• Published by the Office for National Statistics, the UK's official statistical institute.
• Provides a clear snapshot of the administrative hierarchy for a specific point in time (December 2015).
• Licensed under OGL-UK-3.0, permitting wide reuse for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Limitations

• Column names and data types are not documented, requiring inspection after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale joins.
• The data reflects a 2015 boundary structure and may not match current administrative units.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Likely compiled from official government registers and gazetteers.

Time Range

December 2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:03.710014; freshness should be verified

Geography

United Kingdom