Guidance

Bringing together housing, land and planning geospatial datasets

The Geospatial Commission has brought together a collection of sixty five housing, land and planning open datasets to make data easier to find for the sector.

Documents

Housing, Land & Planning Datasets

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Details

The Geospatial Commission was established in 2018 as an expert committee to set the UK’s geospatial strategy and promote the best use of geospatial data. As part of our housing and planning work we have been investigating the barriers to finding and accessing geospatial data and the role it could play in meeting the UK’s housing goals. This webpage supports the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) framework. It brings together a range of useful and open datasets from the hundreds we have identified to make them more findable, in support of the FAIR framework.

The public sector has already released a large amount of data under the Open Government License (OGL) and users are free to use and re-use the information that is available under this licence freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions.

On the 1st July 2020 identifiers TOIDS, UPRNs, USRNs have been made available under the terms of the OGL as well as INSPIRE spatial polygon datasets. It is also the launch date of Ordnance Survey’s new portal for accessing its data, which includes a series of APIs (application programming interface) with up to £1,000 price per calendar month free use of premium data and unlimited use of Ordnance Survey OpenData. Links to these datasets can be found in the list below.

The amount and variety of data used within housing, land and planning in the UK is incredible, covering areas such as:

Illustration of an idea and implementation of urban design

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The Geospatial Commission has identified over 350 datasets and portals that are used during the housing and planning process. They come from a variety of sources, with a variety of licences, and not all of them are open. We have brought them together for the first time in support of our wider Housing and Planning Programme, and we have published a list of 65, most of which are covered by OGL. Some of the datasets do contain 3rd party data which is not covered by an open licence.

If you have suggestions of datasets we should include as we expand this list in the coming weeks, please email us geospatialcommission@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.

The 65 Datasets have been organised into the following categories: Data Catalogues, Identifiers,Building, Environmental, Land, Planning and Statistics.

Data Catalogues

Identifiers

Building

Environmental

Land

Planning

Statistics

Updates to this page

Published 7 April 2020
Last updated 12 November 2020 + show all updates
  1. We have updated the spreadsheet to incorporate the feedback received.

  2. We have updated the spreadsheet to include the new HMLR datasets

  3. We have updated the spreadsheet to include more datasets and links from feedback we have received, including 32 new datasets from Improvement Service, Scotland.

  4. We have edited the webpage text and added datasets taking the total to 65. The new additions are: OS Open UPRN - Identifier Dataset OS Open USRN - Identifier Dataset OS Open TOID - Identifier Dataset UK house building: permanent dwellings started and completed - Statistics dataset Help to Buy (equity loan scheme) statistics - Statistics dataset We have also updated the spreadsheet to include more datasets from feedback we have received.

  5. We have updated the spreadsheet to include more datasets and links from feedback we have received.

  6. We have updated the spreadsheet to incorporate the feedback we have received

  7. We have updated the spreadsheet to include more datasets and links from feedback we have received.

  8. We have added datasets taking the total to 60. The new additions are: Built-up Areas (December 2011) Boundaries V2 - Building dataset GeoClimate Open - Building dataset Important Bird Areas - Environmental dataset National Forest Inventory Woodland England 2018 - Environmental dataset Provisional Agricultural land classification - Land dataset BGS Geology 625k - Land dataset Homes England Land Hub Sites - Planning dataset Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) Impact Risk Zones Social Housing Stock by Local Authority and Private Registered Provider - Statistics dataset Live tables on dwelling stock (including vacants) - Statistics dataset. We have also updated the excel spreadsheet to make edits and include more datasets and links from feedback we have received.

  9. First published.

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