On 23/01/2026 16:01, Owen Boswarva wrote:
OS/GeoPlace's "working assumption" is that the vast majority of Council
tax address datasets will contain the intellectual property rights of
Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace and Royal Mail. They will be "following up
individually" with all the local authorities who have released their
Council Tax addresses, "as listed on datadaptive.com
<http://datadaptive.com>", to ensure that they "understand the
intellectual property and licensing position, and have not released the
data in error."
I think OS's assumption overstates the case – my understanding is that
many local authorities maintain their Council Tax lists separately from
their LLPGs and it is quite plausible that the address data is
"Authority Owned". The quality of the address data in the Council Tax
datasets that have been disclosed to me is variable.
Their email refers specifically to the rationale of Leeds City for
maintaining their Council Tax database separately to the LLPG. It would
be interesting to see that documented somewhere.
That said, I have a feeling that Leeds is more likely to be the norm
than the exception. One of the main reasons for that is mixed use
properties (eg, a flat above a shop) which have to be assessed
separately for Council Tax and Business Rates but form a single property
as far as the LLPG and the PAF are concerned.
I've just looked up one of my own former addresses, for example, and the
building has three entries in the council tax database (one for each
flat) and another in the business rates database (for the business on
the ground floor), but only a single entry in the LLPG and the PAF. That
situation isn't at all uncommon, and every council tax billing authority
in the country will have a system designed to cope with it. And the
simplest way to cope with it is to maintain the property tax database
separately to the LLPG.
Mark
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