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.

By doing this.

So, come on then Scots and Welshpersons: who’s going to take up his challenge?

WriteToThem.com is now one year old – actually the birthday was on Valentine’s day last week. We’re having a few belated celebrations.

• We’ve made the WriteToThem 2005 zeitgeist of statistics about the last year, including a table of MP performance at responding to their constituents’ letters.
• We’ve added the Northern Ireland Assembly. Enter a postcode in Northern Ireland to contact your MLA. Even though the assembly is suspended, MLAs can still do things for their constituents. Thanks to two volunteers Louise and Amias for getting this working.
• We’ve taken off the Beta sign!