UK Administrative Geography Lookup for Wards to Countries, December 2016

Office for National Statistics provides a lookup table linking UK wards to local authority districts, counties, regions, and countries as of 31 December 2016. The dataset contains 9,130 wards after a correction for duplicate codes in version 2. It is available in CSV, GeoJSON, and ESRI REST formats under an OGL-UK-3.0 license.

Use Cases

• Aggregate local data to higher administrative levels based on the hierarchical ward-to-country relationships.
• Create choropleth maps of UK regions using the geospatial boundary data implied by the file formats.
• Join external datasets using ward or local authority district codes as keys.
• Analyze the administrative structure of the UK as it existed at the end of 2016.

Strengths

• Contains a corrected count of 9,130 wards, resolving duplicate codes present in version 1.
• Provides a definitive snapshot of the UK administrative hierarchy as of a specific date (31 December 2016).
• Offers multiple data formats (CSV, GeoJSON, ESRI REST) for different analytical tools.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data reflects a 2016 administrative structure, which may be outdated for current analysis.
• Row count for the full hierarchy is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:26.973595; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom