Performance, progress towards strategic objectives and future strategy

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 6: To provide enhanced and transparent, national, regional and district data services for the property market from 2003

In December 2004, we started to license the re-use of our property price data for individual addresses. This new service was praised by the media as a good example of a government agency making valuable data available for commercial exploitation. The service has been well received. Customers are using the data mainly to provide property valuation models and websites, considerably increasing the transparency of house prices. We are using this service to test and improve our licensing policy and strategy.

Land Registry has achieved accreditation as a member of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) Information Fair Trader Scheme (IFTS). Information produced by Land Registry is protected by Crown copyright and we can now receive a delegation of authority from the Controller of HMSO to establish a pricing policy for licensing re-use of our information.

We have recently sought advice over a data protection issue and also whether we have sufficient powers to provide non-statutory services such as the sale of price paid datasets and extent polygons. The Information Commissioner has now advised us that if the focus of a dataset that we wish to sell is on the property and not on the individual then the data are not regarded as personal.