The Borough is traditionally divided into five localities, or areas. Four are based around the Borough’s major towns in the west of the Borough, with the other grouping together the fringe wards/settlements in the east of the Borough. These areas also correspond with the Borough’s housing management areas.
Area 1 – Spennymoor and its surrounding of the area
Area 2 – Ferryhill and its surrounding of the area
Area 3 – Sedgefield Borough East i.e. Trimdons, Fishburn, Sedgefield
Area 4 – Shildon and its surrounding of the area
Area 5 – Newton Aycliffe and its surrounding of the area
Each area has a Community Area Forum comprising key partners, that monitors the implementation of Area Frameworks (mini Community Strategies) for the locality.
A ward is a geographical area, assigned to electoral ward boundaries. There are 19 wards in Sedgefield Borough that vary quite widely in size, from just under 2,000 to approx, 5,700 in population. Nationally, electoral wards/divisions vary greatly in size, from fewer than 100 residents to more than 30,000. This is not ideal for nationwide comparisons, and also means that data, which can safely be released for larger wards, may not be released for smaller wards due to disclosure requirements (i.e. the need to protect the confidentiality of individuals).
There are 3 layers of Super Output Area, lower, middle and upper. Generally, lower layer super output areas are used, although there will be a move to use middle and upper (once developed) in future.
LSOAs have a minimum population of 1,000 and a mean of 1,500. These are built up using output areas and are constrained to Ward boundaries. They have been named in Sedgefield Borough by Officers of the Strategy and Regeneration section and mean the codes they have been given by ONS become more meaningful to local people (the codes and names are illustrated in the table below…). The following map illustrates the LSOAs in Sedgefield Borough.
MSOAs have a minimum population of 5,000 and a mean of 7,200. They are built from groups of LSOAs and are constrained by Local Authority boundaries. Some data via the Census particularly is available at this level, but no analysis using MSOAs has been done so far.
These are yet to be determined, the minimum size will be approx. 25,000 population.
Output areas sit below LSOAs and are the smallest geographical area for which statistics are available. Most Census data is published at this level and can be used if very targeted areas need to be looked at.
A ward and LSOA map can be downloaded via the links below.