Sub-council population projections provide an indication of the potential future population size and structure for small areas within local authorities.
Sub-council population projections provide an indication of the potential future population size and structure for small areas within local authorities.
Here you can find a national set of sub-council population projections for small areas within each local authority area in Scotland. These population projections have been developed in collaboration with the National Records of Scotland (NRS) with support from the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. The projections use past trends in mortality, fertility, and migration to estimate what the population of an area might look like in the future.
Population projections have a range of uses, including planning and providing service delivery. The NRS regularly produce population projections at a national and sub-national level, including for council areas. These sub-council projections allow a more nuanced view of where people, and different population groups, are likely to live in future within a local authority. It should be noted that projections such as these come with a number of limitations, as set out on the NRS website. More details on the methodology and limitations can be found in the FAQs section and methodology note.
This set of population projections are part of a wider offer of support for local authorities provided by the Improvement Service and NRS. The NRS have also prepared guidance, instructional videos, and a data entry tool to allow local authorities to produce their own small area projections, including the facility to develop custom sub-council areas and assumptions. Training in the POPGROUP software used to develop these projections has also been provided. You can find this guidance on the NRS website.
You can download the outputs here. More details on these projections, as well as more detailed input and output files for POPGROUP are also available on request. We would also be interested in hearing more about how you use these projections and any other feedback on useful outputs that we could produce.