Report Distributed for John Mason MSP

Spring 2020 Parliamentary Report distributed for John Mason MSP, the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow Shettleston Constituency

The report was distributed throughout his constituency area and was, therefore, a boundary distribution since it had to be distributed within the boundary of his constituency area.  This area included parts of Glasgow City Centre, Shettleston, Baillieston, Mount Vernon and Daldowie, all of which are located on the East side of Glasgow.

With this type of distribution, it is very important to stay within the constituency boundary since straying outside it can have damaging consequences.  To achieve this, we created a detailed map showing the boundary and used this to manage the distribution.  The areas on the boundary are clearly the ones that had to be managed most carefully, especially when the boundary literally runs up the middle of some streets so we had to be sure to deliver to only one side of the relevant streets.

Other challenging aspects of this distribution included ensuring that everyone in the constituency area received the report as well as dealing with areas of new housing, which was particularly challenging in Bridgeton and Parkhead areas which are close to Glasgow City Centre where a large amount of new housing was built as part of the Commonwealth Games regeneration programme.

The main issue that we faced here was that unlike areas where new houses are built on greenfield sites, this housing was built in area where housing previously existed and was demolished, resulting in the maps of these areas changing, removing some streets that once existed from the map of the area and adding new streets that were not shown in the map.

We used our GPS tracking system to check that the distribution area was covered properly – i.e. that we did not miss any areas or even streets.  This was an important part of the management of the distribution because with such a large area, it is very easy to miss areas or streets by mistake, especially when the geography of some of the area has changed.