Scott Martin:

Yes. In Scotland, there is the Improvement Service, and if you go to www.spatialhub.scot, you will find a polling district map of Scotland. Not all of it is up to date—some of it was updated just before the General Election, and some of it is a little bit older—but there is now a complete polling district map of Scotland. Where that data is available, polling districts are a sensible way of drawing boundaries.

The reason why the Boundary Commission for Scotland has had to take a postcode approach is because it cannot use wards, and it did not have the polling districts. I appreciate that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here, in that polling districts are supposed to be divisions of parliamentary constituencies, rather than being used the other way round, but thinking back to the first Scottish Parliament boundary review, I recall that the Boundary Commission, after its first review, was prepared to take representations from Edinburgh on realigning everything with existing polling districts. Electoral administrators and campaigners in Scotland have practical issues as a result of there being non-coterminous boundaries—it means they have some very strange polling districts—but those issues would certainly be removed if everything was built from one set of polling districts.