Welsh Community Reviews

Welsh Community Reviews are the equivalent of Community Governance Reviews for Wales, with some slight differences. They can either be done at a local level, or DBCC can do one on a Council's behalf. Community Reviews mainly affect community council and community ward boundaries; however, they can also include "consequential changes" to the unitary wards, which will keep the ward boundaries in line with the community boundaries. We don't cover community council elections, but we are interested in changes to unitary wards.

Discovery

Some of these will appear in slack from our legislation.gov.uk scraper, but, unfortunately, not all of them. Our current understanding is if a community review was conducted by the council rather than the DBCC, then legislation.gov.uk will not publish them (We could potentially scrape https://www.dbcc.gov.wales/reviews, but this may or may not be worth the effort). Once we've discovered a Community Review, the main thing we're interested in whether or not it includes "consequential changes". If it does, then we should try and process it.

Data

With LGBCE Community Reviews, we can't process them until after their effective date, because there is no easy way to get the new boundaries, until they're published in BoundaryLine. However, for Welsh Community Reviews, it seems that the DBCC has a copy of the new wards shapefiles, even if DBCC didn't do the review themselves. In this situation, they don't publish them but we've found that if we ask nicely, they'll send us that shapefile. This arrangement may not last, but, for now, if we can get a shapefile, then we can process a completed DBCC Community Review before the first election using the new boundaries, as outlined in the following section.

Process

Do the following locally, recording the final commands for use on production:

1. Check the shapefile in QGIS. We're getting these from the DBCC directly and so far they've had some minor issues. Some things to look out for:
   • invalid geometry: Use the check validity algorithm in the toolbox and, if necessary, fix geometries.
   • too many wards: Make sure that the file only contains electoral wards and doesn't have community wards. Some files have had a field name like "community" but the feature names and boundaries are for the electoral wards.
   • boundaries haven't changed: Make sure that the wards in the file actually have the 'consquential changes' applied. One way to check is by comparing the the previous boundaries. Another is to look for changes from the maps in the legislation.
2. Set end date on the previous division set in admin.
3. Manually create a new division set in admin for the Community Review:
4. Copy the divisions from the previous division set to the new one using python manage.py copy_divisions <old_id> <new_id> --no-geographies
   • This is ok to do, because a Community Review can only change unitary ward boundaries, and nothing else. --no-geographies strips the current geometry and gss code.
5. Upload the shapefile to the correct s3 bucket, e.g. "s3://ee.boundary-reviews.production/swansea/The County of Swansea (Communities) Order 2026/"
6. Use import_lgbce to try and import the boundaries, creating and uploading a name_map.json, if necessary, e.g. python manage.py import_lgbce -s 'pembrokeshire/The County of Pembrokeshire (Communities) Order 2026/PEMBRO_1_fixed.zip' PEM
   • import_lgbce was obviously not written with DBCC reviews in mind, but thankfully it works just fine.
7. Check that the boundaries look good by generating the pmtiles file using update_pmtiles --divset-ids <new_id> and checking it out.

If it looks good locally, the shapefile and optional name_map is uploaded to s3, and you've got the commands ready to go, then create repeat steps 2-7 (skip 5) on production.