operates out of the headquarters of East Renfrewshire Council in Giffnock. Registration county The County of Renfrew is a registration county used for land registration under the authority of the Land Registration (Scotland) Act 1979. For this purpose, the county is defined as it existed in 1868 and so includes several areas subsequently annexed to Glasgow. The Renfrewshire registration county was the first to introduce the new Land Register of Scotland on the 6 April 1981. Other For a number of purposes, the three modern local councils in the county co-operate on a number of matters. Renfrewshire is retained as a Joint Valuation Board area, which values properties for the purposes of council tax and non-domestic rates, and is also used for electoral registration. Councillors from the three local councils also join together, in association with other local groups, to form the Renfrewshire Education Trust which makes educational-related grants in the county. There is a Renfrewshire Civil Contingencies Service, the first civil contingencies planning body in Scotland to adopt the shared services model of co-operation between local authorities. Central government bodies also use the historic boundaries of the area for some purposes. 'Scottish Enterprise Renfrewshire', a non-departmental public body accountable to the devolved Scottish Parliament which encourages enterprise and economic development, covers the three modern council areas in the county. Renfrewshire was officially a postal county used for administrative purposes by Royal Mail. Whilst this system has not been used for sorting mail since 1996, Royal Mail still keeps and distributes data relating to postal counties in the United Kingdom. Parliamentary representation Following the Act of Union 1707, which created Great Britain as a sovereign state, Renfrewshire was a county constituency for elections to the House of Commons in Parliament. The town of Renfrew was not included in the county constituency, being a parliamentary burgh, and from 1832 the other burghs of Greenock, Paisley and Port Glasgow were similarly excluded. Following the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885, Renfrewshire was mainly divided into four constituencies . These were the county constituencies of East Renfrewshire and West Renfrewshire; and the burgh constituencies of Paisley and Greenock. From 1832, Port Glasgow and Renfrew had been part of the Kilmarnock Burghs constituency and remained as such, only being absorbed into West and East Renfrewshire respectively in 1918 with the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918. The distribution of seats remained generally