Land Registry and Registers of Scotland Sharing Datasets From Today

HM Land Registry (HMLR) and Registers of Scotland (RoS) are sharing their coveted INSPIRE spatial polygon datasets, which together map over 23 million title extents across England, Wales and Scotland, under new, less restricted terms from 1 July 2020. The new terms will broaden commercial use, creating opportunities and fuelling innovation in land and property, utility and infrastructure related industries. Sharing of these datasets is an outcome of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), including Ordnance Survey’s (OS) new freedoms for the publication of property extents. The PSGA gives access to new data, while improving accessibility and increasing freedoms to share it. The combined data, detailing over 23 million individual title extents based on the OS MasterMap Topography Layer, is now available under less restrictive terms under Open Government Licence (OGL). The change opens this data up to much broader application across the public and private sectors.

Interim Director of Digital, Data and Technology at HM Land Registry, Andrew Trigg says: “It’s an exciting time for geospatial data in the UK. Alongside the Geospatial Commission, OS and RoS, we’ve been working to enable and encourage colleagues, companies and entrepreneurs to access and apply our data in novel and exciting ways. 1 July will certainly be a milestone to that end, and hopefully one which captures the imagination of everyone from app developers to analysts and helps to unlock the potential in the UK’s geospatial industry.”

HMLR’s INSPIRE Polygon Dataset will be available under the new terms, from 1 July 2020, from its new Use Land and Property Data service, while RoS’s INSPIRE data will be available from https://ros.locationcentre.co.uk/inspire/. This date also marks the launch of OS’ new portal for accessing its data – OS Data Hub, as well as a series of APIs with up to £1,000 pcm free use of premium data and unlimited use of OS OpenData – all intended to support innovation in the developer community.