Data sources and methodology

What AreaIQ Places is

A place and authority intelligence utility for the United Kingdom. Given a postcode, town or council, it shows where the place sits administratively, which bodies govern it and what each is responsible for, which boundaries apply, and selected local data with its provenance. It is not a property portal, not a "best place to live" ranking, not a resident review site and not an area score. Nothing on it judges whether a place is good.

How a place is resolved

The unit is the postcode sector, the outward code plus the first digit of the inward code (SG4 9). There are 11,235 of them carrying 1,809,062 live postcodes. A sector is a Royal Mail delivery construct and does not follow administrative boundaries, so for each sector we take every live postcode in the National Statistics Postcode Lookup and count the ONS codes it carries for country, region, county, council, ward, county electoral division, Westminster constituency, police force area and NHS bodies.

The result for each level is the dominant code with its share of postcodes, plus every alternative above a 2% threshold. 2,265 sectors straddle more than one council and 8,686 straddle more than one ward. Pages show the share as a badge and list the alternatives; dropping the share would state something the data does not support. 149 sectors have no council at all: 93 are in the Crown Dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands), where the UK council structure does not apply, and the rest are non-geographic postcodes such as PO boxes. Those pages say so instead of rendering an empty hierarchy.

Names for every code, and the structural relationships between them (which districts sit in which county, which wards in which district), come from the ONS Open Geography Portal. Containment is never inferred from which codes happen to share a postcode sector.

Who runs this place

What each authority is responsible for comes from a registry of statutory duties by authority type: district councils, county councils, unitary authorities, metropolitan boroughs, London boroughs, Scottish council areas, Welsh principal councils and Northern Ireland councils each carry the duties that type holds in law. Exceptions are recorded explicitly, for example that transport, policing and fire in London sit with the Greater London Authority rather than the borough, and that combined authorities hold strategic transport and economic development where they exist. Fire and rescue authorities are attached through the ONS district-to-fire lookup, police forces and integrated care boards through the postcode lookup itself.

The business panel on each sector page reads the same registry and names the bodies likely to be relevant to a business at that address. It is a starting point, not legal advice, and it says so.

Official council websites come from Wikidata, filtered to government domains, and are held for 376 of 382 councils. The rest fall back to the GOV.UK council finder.

Local data modules

Each module on a sector page is joined by sector from one processed file, names its source and licence, links to the original, and shows the date the file was last refreshed. Coverage is the number of sectors with a record; a sector with none shows "Not available", never a default.

What we deliberately do not publish

• Any score, ranking or verdict. Different people weigh different things. We show the facts and their sources.
• Crime or safety. Recorded-crime open data is patchy and approximate and is not the same as how safe a place is. Product decision, June 2026.
• A flood zone figure. The processed flood file assigned the same lowest-risk value to every English sector, which is a pipeline fall-through rather than a finding. Flood risk is per address; every page links to the official checker for its nation instead.
• Whether a GP practice is accepting patients. That figure in an earlier version was a fixed assumption, not data. Practice counts come from OpenStreetMap; registration status is on NHS.uk.
• An Ofsted grade for a school. Ofsted no longer publishes a single overall grade for schools in England and the DfE register we list from carries none. Every school shows "Rating unavailable" and a link to its inspection reports. A missing grade is never shown as a low one.
• House prices as a multiple of local earnings. The earlier figure divided by a single national income constant. The page now shows the household income a standard 4.5x mortgage on the median price would need, labelled as arithmetic on the price.
• Estimated solar savings or payback. Those depended on a fixed electricity price and system cost. Irradiation and modelled output remain, labelled as modelled.

The data model

Only the United Kingdom is live, but nothing in the model is UK-shaped. Every resolved area is an AdministrativeArea with an id, countryCode, adminLevel (0 country to 5 service area), a generic adminType (country, region, county, district, ward, constituency, police_area, health_board and so on), a localType holding the wording that country uses ("London borough council"), localName and englishName, officialCode, officialWebsite, share and alternatives, plus the registry fields sourceUrl, retrievedAt and status. Council boundaries are held as separate GeoJSON keyed by officialCode. Adding another country means adding its types and a data bundle, not changing the resolver.

Where the pages live

Sector pages are at /uk/<sector> (for example /uk/sg4-9), council profiles at /councils/<name>/, towns at /area/<town>/. Postcode pages that once lived on areaiq.org redirect here one to one. AreaIQ Places is a separate product from AreaIQ, the business opportunity intelligence platform; the two share a company and nothing else.

Updates and corrections

Administrative geography is rebuilt from each new National Statistics Postcode Lookup release. Local data files are refreshed on their own cadence, shown per module. If a figure looks wrong, email [email protected] with the sector and the figure; we check against the source and correct or remove it.

Licences and attribution

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, including ONS, HM Land Registry, DfE, Ofcom, DfT and MHCLG data. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 via the ONS Open Geography Portal. OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Council websites from Wikidata, CC0. Solar data from the European Commission Joint Research Centre PVGIS service. Map tiles by Esri, HERE, Garmin and OpenStreetMap contributors.