The electoral wards of Belfast are subdivisions of the city, used primarily for statistics and elections. Belfast had 51 wards from May 1973, which were revised in May 1985 and again in May 1993. The number of wards was increased to 60 with the 2014 changes in local government. Wards are the smallest administrative unit in Northern Ireland and are set by the Local Government Boundaries Commissioner and reviewed every 8–12 years.[1]
Wards are used to create constituencies for local government authorities, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. In elections to Belfast City Council, the 60 wards are split into ten District Electoral Areas, each of which contains between five and seven wards, with the number of councillors it elects equal to the number of wards it contains. The constituencies for elections to the House of Commons and the Assembly are coterminous and are created by amalgamating wards into larger areas, with the city's wards split between the four 'Belfast' constituencies, although these also contain wards from bordering local authorities.
The use of wards for statistical purposes by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) has changed since the creation of 'Census Output Areas' (5022 in total) and 'Super Output Areas' (890 in total), which were created to address the variance in size of the 582 wards across Northern Ireland.[2] Each ward contains several Super Output Area, which in turn are made up of a number of Census Output Areas.