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 describe a new open address dataset released by Test Valley Borough Council.

Background

As related in previous posts, I have recently been requesting Council Tax address datasets from a number of 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/

Release from Test Valley Borough Council

The latest council to release its Council Tax address list is Test Valley Borough Council in the South East region of England. The Council disclosed all of the requested information without difficulties and granted permission for re-use under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

You can download my correspondence with the Council: CT_address_list_Test_Valley_10848_[NO_DATA_correspondence_only].zip (0.21 MB).

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

Why you can't have the dataset – or maybe you can?

I am not publishing Test Valley Borough Council's address dataset here, due to the non-specific but lingering risk of further unsubstantiated claims of infringement from Ordnance Survey and GeoPlace LLP. You can read more about that issue in my recent blog post.

However, there is nothing to stop you asking the Council directly for a copy of the data file. For tips on submitting access to information and re-use requests see this other blog post. My requests to Test Valley Borough Council were submitted on 18 May 2026 and the Council's reference is 10848.

More about Test Valley Borough Council's address dataset

Test Valley Borough Council has disclosed its Council Tax address dataset to me in the form of an Excel workbook 'FOI 10848.xlsx' that contains 59,715 records. Each record includes the full address and postcode (combined in a single field), local property reference, Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN), and Council Tax valuation band, for a domestic property in the Test Valley Borough Council area.

The dataset appears to be well-maintained although there are some inconsistencies in the formatting of the addresses.

UPRNs are missing for 184 of the 59,715 records in the list, including 34 records where the UPRN is given as "TERMINATED". UPRN values in five other records are obviously wrong but for two of those the likely correct UPRNs can be inferred from UPRNs given for neighbouring properties. UPRNs in 9,964 records contain leading zeros that should be removed for matching purposes.

Following those corrections, all but 39 of the UPRNs match to records in the May 2026 release of Ordnance Survey's Ordnance Survey's OS Open UPRN product. This means that almost all of the property records in the dataset can be geocoded for mapping and geographic analysis of domestic properties in the Test Valley Borough Council area.