Postcodes on TheyWorkForYou

If you enter your postcode on TheyWorkForYou and it’s Scottish or Northern Irish, you’re now presented with your MSPs and MLAs as well as your MP, which makes sense given the site covers their Parliament and Assembly respectively. 🙂 You also get an extra tab in the navigation linking through to Your MSPs or MLAs. In order to do this, I needed a quick way of determining if a postcode was Northern Irish or Scottish. Northern Ireland was easy, as all postcodes there begin with BT. I assumed Scotland was also easy, which turned out to be true apart from the TD postcode area that straddled the border like a mail-sorting Niagara Falls. After some very dull investigation, I eventually worked out that e.g. most of TD15 is in England, but (amongst others) TD15 1X* is in Scotland, except for TD15 1XX which is apparently back in England. The final result was the postcode_is_scottish() function in postcode.inc, which (hopefully) correctly determines if a given postcode is Scottish or not – perhaps someone else will find it useful.

2 Comments

  1. Excellent development! Could you please also add names of relevant MEPs – I’ve found it quite hard to locate “my” MEP during recent attempts to clarify bits of the Lisbon Treaty. Don’t know any names, never met any of them, one who used to be based in Battersea (Labour Party Office?) was so low profile as to be invisible + inaudible. If I want to complain about the so-called democratic deficit in the EU, it would help if my “elected” EU representative could at least be faintly identifiable.