Owen Boswarva's blog

This is the latest in a series of blog posts about the campaign for open address data in the UK. Previous posts are listed at the bottom.

In this post, I highlight an open address dataset published by Mid Devon District Council.

Background

As related in previous posts, I have been requesting Council Tax address datasets from local authorities in England, and asking for permission to re-use the data under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

I have created a landing page on my Datadaptive site with download links and other information about the Council Tax address datasets released as open data so far:

www.datadaptive.com/addr/

I recently published a progress update on that project.

Release from Mid Devon District Council

This case is unusual, and a little convoluted.

I submitted my standard requests to the Council in mid-August, asking for a current list of domestic properties in the Council's area with the Council Tax band, full address, local reference, and Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) for each property, along with permission to re-use the information under the Open Government Licence.

The Council responded the following week. The Council provided a link to a data file on the Council's website that contained a list of UPRNs and corresponding Council Tax bands. According to the Wayback Machine, the file had been published proactively by the Council sometime after July 10th, i.e. the month before I submitted my request, but that seems to have been a coincidence.

The Council withheld the addresses on the basis of the exemptions in sections 40(2) and 43(2) of the FOI Act ("personal information" and "prejudice to commercial interests" respectively). I requested an internal review.

What neither I nor (evidently) the Council staff handling my requests realised at the time was that the Council had also publishing a data file containing domestic addresses and corresponding Council Tax bands, in the same location on its website. In fact, the Council has been publishing that information annually since at least 2024.

This mix-up apparently occurred because the last annual update of the file was labelled as "All Non Domestic Properties" on the download page. That has now been corrected.

In its internal review outcome, received this week, the Council has dropped its reliance on the two exemptions. As both of the relevant data files are available on the Council's website as "issued under" the Open Government Licence v3 (OGL), I have understood that the Council no longer maintains that the requested address information is subject to any third-party intellectual property rights that the Council is not authorised to license.

Unfortunately the two relevant files are not sorted in the same order and do not contain any common data attribute that can be used to match records, so there is no easy way to combine the two lists or geocode the addresses via the UPRNs. But the Council has indicated it might publish a "merged" version in future.

The Council has not disclosed its local references for the properties on the Council Tax list, or provided a reason for withholding that part of the requested information.

You can download my correspondence with the Council: CT_address_list_Mid_Devon_FOI11433_IR11433_[NO_DATA_correspondence_only].zip (0.68 MB).

Thanks to Council staff for facilitating the publication and open licensing of this data.

Access to this dataset

The Council Tax property list is available on the Council's website, currently as two data files, and updated annually.

Additional files containing address records for commercial properties are available from the same page.

More about Mid Devon District Council's address dataset

Mid Devon District Council's Council Tax address dataset is currently published as two data files. The CSV file 'rv001-all-domestic-properties-annual-update.csv' contains 39,066 records, each of which includes the full address and postcode (combined in a single field) and Council Tax valuation band for a domestic property in the Mid Devon District Council area. The Excel workbook 'uprns-tax-bands.xlsx' contains 39,150 records, each of which contains the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) and Council Tax valuation band for a domestic property in the Mid Devon District Council area.

The information in the lists seems to be well-maintained. As the UPRNs have been supplied in a separate file, the address records cannot be easily geocoded at property level using open data sources.