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For at least 3 years, almost every Fire & Rescue Service in the UK has been using a risk-mapping tool (provided by DCLoG) to predict the relative risk from fires, vehicle accidents and the myriad range of incident types that we respond to. The building block for the risk maps is the Output Area. Re-drawing these will make comparisons of risk trends, and analysis of the relative benefits of the fire prevention strategies employed, somewhere between very difficult and meaningless. We use these risk maps to prioritise initiatives such as home safety visits, to engage and work with partners when comparing risks to communities, and to make longer-term planning decisions about where we need to base fire stations. The risk maps themselves are based upon demographic data (Census 2001), travel times for response purposes over the road network, and XY-plotted incident locations. If a serious fire happened in OA AB1 before (say) 2011, but the same incident is plotted in OA AB2 in 2012, the risk maps will show that AB1 is now a safer place to be, and probably requires less preventative effort. This is not just a case of marketing more efficiently to customers - it is a matter of real-world public safety. Apologies if this sounds somewhat emotive when discussing data boundaries - but you did ask whether OAs are being used for other purposes :)