Community councils are required to be established by local authorities. They are the most local tier of statutory representation in Scotland. They bridge the gap between local authorities and communities and help to make public bodies aware of the opinions and needs of the communities they represent. Community councils are statutory consultees under various processes, such as for planning applications.

There are many instances where polygons do not tessellate or snap to local authority boundaries. The Spatial Hub processing can correct for some minor gap errors (<5m) but not larger ones. Such gaps in the dataset mean that it cannot potentially be used for some kinds of spatial analysis e.g. point in polygon, because some point locations may fall within the gaps. These gaps either require amendment at source or approval for the IS to change.