The register
All of it is public. None of it is ours.
Almost everything on the map was published by government under the Open Government Licence and paid for already. The work is in gathering it, keeping it current and putting it in one place. Charging rent on access to it is not a business, and this page is how we make that checkable.
Planning and policy
Planning and policy
| Source | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| planning.data.gov.ukConservation areas, listed buildings, scheduled monuments, parks and gardens, world heritage sites, brownfield register, Article 4 directions, neighbourhood plans, green belt, tree preservation zones, common land, planning applications, local area requirements | Daily | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| legislation.gov.ukActs and statutory instruments, as structured data | As enacted | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| gov.uk and MHCLGNational Planning Policy Framework, Planning Practice Guidance, the fee schedule, Housing Delivery Test results, quarterly planning statistics | Irregular and quarterly | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Find Case Law, The National ArchivesPlanning judgments. Coverage begins around 2001 | Continuous | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Local planning authoritiesAdopted local plan policy text, supplementary planning documents, conservation area appraisals, design guides, validation checklists, levy charging schedules | Weekly, oldest first | Open Government Licence v3.0 or authority terms |
| Council planning portalsApplications and decisions, crawled directly | Daily, plus historical backfill | Governed by each site's robots directives |
| PlanItDecided planning applications across the United Kingdom | Daily | Free non-commercial, rate limited |
Heritage, ecology and environment
Heritage, ecology and environment
| Source | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Historic EnglandListed buildings, scheduled monuments, registered parks and gardens, battlefields, heritage at risk | Continuous | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Natural EnglandSites of special scientific interest, special areas of conservation, special protection areas, Ramsar sites, ancient woodland, national landscapes, national parks, nature reserves, priority habitats, impact risk zones, character areas, agricultural land classification, nutrient neutrality catchments | Quarterly | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Environment AgencyFlood map for planning, surface water risk, flood defences, historic flood outlines, historic landfill, source protection zones, climate change allowances | Quarterly | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| British Geological Survey, Coal Authority, UKHSABedrock geology, coal mining reporting areas, radon atlas | As published | BGS OpenGeoscience and Open Government Licence |
| DataMapWales, Historic Environment Scotland, NatureScot, SEPAWelsh and Scottish constraints and flood mapping | As published | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
Land, property and ownership
Land, property and ownership
| Source | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| HM Land RegistryINSPIRE title boundaries, corporate and overseas ownership registers, Price Paid data, and official copies ordered on request through the Business Gateway | On demand and monthly | HM Land Registry licences and Open Government Licence |
| MHCLG Energy Performance registerDomestic, non-domestic and display certificates | Continuous | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Ordnance Survey Data HubVector and raster tiles, addresses, unique property references, open greenspace | As published | Ordnance Survey OpenData and licensed APIs |
People, transport and context
People, transport and context
| Source | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Office for National StatisticsLocal authority districts, wards, planning authority boundaries, output areas, built-up areas, postcode centroids, Census 2021 | Annual | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Department for TransportPublic transport access nodes, annual average daily traffic counts | As published | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Department for Education, NHS Organisation Data ServiceSchools with phase and inspection rating, GP surgeries and hospitals | As published | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Transport for LondonPublic transport accessibility levels | As published | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| postcodes.ioPostcode autocomplete and reverse geocoding | Quarterly | MIT and Open Government Licence |
| OpenInfraMap, Open Charge Map, ZenodoPower infrastructure, charge points, distribution network substation service areas | Continuous | Open Database Licence and Creative Commons |
Basemaps and imagery
Basemaps and imagery
| Source | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Mapbox, MapTiler, GoogleBasemaps, satellite imagery, terrain and contours, static map images, isochrones, street level panoramas | Continuous | Commercial licences |
Not sources
Two things that are processing, not data.
They are listed here rather than in the table above, deliberately.
- Anthropic
- Drafting, summarising, classification, and the judgement about whether a change to a watched source matters.
- Voyage AI
- Turning ingested policy text into vectors so it can be searched by meaning as well as by exact terms.
A model is not a place facts come from. Everything a model writes here has to be traceable to something in the table above, or it does not get written.
Freshness
Sources are watched, and staleness is detected four different ways.
Because there are four different ways a source can go out of date, and only one of them looks like a change.
01
The content changes
Anything revised in place is hashed on every check. A change in the hash is examined, and a judgement is made about whether it matters. A council's content system re-rendering the same document is not news. A council renumbering its policies is, because every draft citing the old numbers is now wrong.
02
The document is replaced at a new address
Some sources publish a fresh file each year rather than editing the old one. The old file keeps returning a perfectly healthy response forever, so a content check reports it as fine precisely because it is stale. Those are checked against the calendar instead, and counted separately from the healthy ones.
03
Nothing has checked it recently enough
Every source has a cadence and a tolerance. A source overdue against its own cadence is surfaced as overdue, not as fine.
04
The number is right but no longer current
A levy schedule adopted years ago is indexed each year. On a 2016 schedule the current factor is 1.476, so quoting the adopted rate understates the levy by nearly half. That drift is checked as its own kind of staleness.
The national policy corpus is checked daily rather than weekly, because it sits underneath every draft in the country at once: a week’s lag on the framework being replaced is a week of citing a superseded framework in every authority simultaneously.
Crawling
How we behave on council websites
Councils did not ask to be crawled, so the posture is cautious in every direction.
Robots directives are fetched, parsed and honoured before any application page is requested, matched to our own crawler name and falling back to the general rules, with crawl delays obeyed. A site that answers our robots request with a server error or a rate limit is treated as disallowed, not as permitted: we never crawl a site we could not confirm is open.
Requests are identified, so a council administrator reading their logs can see who we are and reach us. Each domain is paced to roughly one request every two and a half seconds. Councils whose portal software cannot be identified, or which are closed off, are flagged rather than crawled.
There are two independent stops, checked before every single network request: an environment switch that needs no database at all, and a live flag that halts running crawls at their next request without a redeploy. A database error while checking the second is treated as a stop, so a fault can never quietly release the crawler.
Attribution
Licence and attribution
Public sector data used here is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and contains public sector information. Ordnance Survey data is used under the terms of its own licences, with attribution stamped onto every map figure we produce. Land Registry data is used under Land Registry licences. Mapping and imagery are used under commercial licences held by Wren.
Where a dataset’s licence does not permit us to redistribute it, we do not. That is the reason a small number of layers show a rendered result without an export.
Start here
We would rather show you the gaps.
The coverage register lists what we hold for every authority and, more usefully, what we do not. All 378 of them.
Operational state, including whether the corpus check is currently behind, is on the status page.