[Talk-GB] Metropolitan counties and other boundaries

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 20 February 2014 11:34, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> one thing I noticed is that
> there are two schools of thought regarding Metropolitan Districts. These are
> a subdivision of Metropolitan Counties, of which there are six: Greater
> Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and
> West Yorkshire.

> I would like to normalise this tagging, and looking at the current usage
> above and the wiki[1], propose that the Metropolitan Counties become
> boundary=ceremonial, and the Metropolitan Districts become
> boundary=administrative, admin_level=8.

If the "Metropolitan Districts" have essentially the same
administrative powers/functions as a unitary authority, then I think
they should be tagged with the same admin_level (i.e. 6) to reflect
that fact. We'd then be consistently using admin_level=6 for the
highest tier of local government. If they are slighty different (i.e.
some powers rest elsewhere) then maybe we could consider using
admin_level=7 instead. As far as I can tell, they're definitely not
similar to the district councils under a normal county council, so iI
think it would be better to avoid using admin_level=8.

Ceremonial counties are a completely separate division of the country
into Lord Lieutenancy areas -- see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England . So in
OSM I'd expect to find these in existence over the whole country, not
just for the Metropolitan Counties. Since they have no administrative
local-government function, I wouldn't expect them to need or have an
admin_level tag. Sometimes they'll be coterminous with a normal county
(i.e. the area controlled by a County Council). In which case, I'd
expect to see two different relations in OSM, one for each entity.

To further complicate things, it seems that in a relatively recent
development, there is now a "Greater Manchester Statutory City Region"
with a "Greater Manchester Combined Authority" that does have some
significant administrative functions. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Manchester_Statutory_City_Region
. This region is coterminous with the Greater Manchester Ceremonial
County, but is a different entity. As above, I'd expect the two
identical boundaries to have separate OSM relations. One with
boundary=ceremonial and no admin_level tag, and the other with
boundary=administrative and an appropriate admin_level. The
admin_level value needs to be greater than 5 (English Regions) and
less than the value we've used for the individual borough/city areas.
So presumably we wouldn't be able to use admin_level=6 for the
"Metropolitan Districts" within Greater Manchester, so 6 can be used
by the "Combined Authority". Whether we should use 7 rather than 8 for
the "Metropolitan Districts" would, I think, depend on how much their
powers/responsibility are similar to a normal districts within a
normal county, and how much they retain more of the character of a
Unitary Authority or other "Metropolitan Districts".

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker