Description: While Royal Mail (RM) allocate and maintain postcodes for the purposes of delivering mail, National Records of Scotland (NRS) create and maintain digital postcode geographies to support the production of high quality statistics. This dataset provides the digital boundaries of postcode sectors which are the next hierarchical level above the individual postcode, represented by the outward code plus the first character of the inward code. For example, if the individual postcode is EH12 7TB, then the sector of that postcode is EH12 7. NRS publish these boundaries twice a year as part of the Scottish Postcode Directory (SPD) which should be considered the definitive source for postcode geographies in Scotland.
Description: Intermediate zones are a statistical geography that sit between data zones and local authorities, created for use with the Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics (SNS) programme and the wider public sector. Intermediate zones are used for the dissemination of statistics that are not suitable for release at the data zone level because of the sensitive nature of the statistic, or for reasons of reliability. Intermediate Zones were designed to meet constraints on population thresholds (2,500 - 6,000 household residents), to nest within local authorities, and to be built up from aggregates of data zones. Intermediate zones also represent a relatively stable geography that can be used to analyse change over time, with changes only occurring after a Census. Following the update to intermediate zones using 2011 Census data, there are now 1,279 Intermediate Zones covering the whole of Scotland.