I think that confirms which edition was pre recorded tonight! Surprised they didn't crash into the live programme and go pan regional. However messy that would look, I think it would have been justified.
I've heard it suggested that in the dual (and triple) ITV regions, both (all) the sub regional elements are pre recorded, so that the presenters can take over 'live' if any sub regional playout crashes ?
I think not. I believe that the general default in most regions is to pre-record one full 30-minute sub-region "as live" (e.g. 17:15 - 17:45, or whatever?), and do the other full sub-region genuinely live from 6pm. There are ad-hoc exceptions to this though (such as some pan-regional sections presumably recorded even earlier still (?), with the generic GCI "gallery" backdrop, and played into both editions of the programme).
Only Calendar routinely has the latter part of the 6pm programme live pan-regionally on most/all weeknights.
West Country loves stories from the Taunton-ish area, as they can justify including them in both sub-regions' editions. I'm sure that other regions have their equivalents of that too. Swindon news can legitimately be shared between West Country ("East" version only) and Meridian (Thames Valley-only version and/or pan-"West" version), for example.
Clearly, those non-geographic generic feature items from the likes of Kevin Ashford are also duplicated across most regions.
Your local presenters will likely precede/follow a generic report package with some guff or statistics that frame the generic subject in terms of how it applies to your region/sub-region, even though the package itself usually lacks this.
Sometimes, multiple slightly different edits of the same pooled item will be created. For example... a report from London Fashion Week, with the reporter having quick chats with attendee designers hailing from various parts of the UK during his/her time filming there and editing a different chat into the middle of each version of an otherwise generic package.