West Lothian Council
Scottish unitary authority council in West Lothian, Scotland, United Kingdom
West Lothian Council (Scottish Gaelic: Comhairle Lodainn an Iar) is the local government authority for West Lothian council area.
History
West Lothian District Council
Local government across Scotland was reorganised in 1975 under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, which replaced the counties and burghs with a two-tier structure of upper-tier regions and lower-tier districts. West Lothian became a district within the Lothian region. Under that system, the authority was named West Lothian District Council. West Lothian district took its name from the historic county of West Lothian, which had covered a similar but not identical area.
West Lothian Council
Local government was reorganised again in 1996 under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994, which abolished the regions and districts created in 1975 and established 32 single-tier council areas across Scotland, one being West Lothian.
In 2025, parts of the council were affected by a significant cyber attack.
Political control
The council has been under no overall control since 2007, with a Labour leader since 2012.
The first election to West Lothian District Council was held in 1974, initially operating as a shadow authority alongside the outgoing authorities until the new system came into force on 16 May 1975.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “West Lothian Council” is scottish unitary authority council in West Lothian, Scotland, United Kingdom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through West, Lothian and Council, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7985814. VIAF identifies the subject as 130361239. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1973, 1996 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Lothian Council” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.