Notes

How the UK public data tools work

Four small tools on top of UK government data: planning constraints, food hygiene ratings, the Charity Commission register and Ofsted. None of them scrape anything. Each time you run one, it reads the official API or open data file there and then, and gives you back one flat row per thing, so you're never looking at an old copy.

October 2026, by Nav

Planning constraints

You give it postcodes or coordinates in England. It checks each one against 28 datasets on planning.data.gov.uk: conservation areas, listed buildings, Article 4 directions, tree preservation orders, flood zones, green belt, National Landscapes, SSSIs, scheduled monuments and so on. Postcodes are turned into coordinates with postcodes.io.

You get back one row per location with a yes/no for each constraint, the council, ward and parish, and any listed buildings or protected trees nearby with their distance. BA1 1LZ in Bath, for example, has the Grand Pump Room (Grade I) 8 m away.

Worth knowing: conservation areas, Article 4 and tree preservation orders depend on each council uploading their data, and not all of them have yet. So "no" means "not in the data", not "definitely not".

Food hygiene ratings

You search by business name, distance from a postcode, council, business type or rating. It asks the Food Standards Agency's ratings API, which covers every rated food business in the UK.

You get back one row per business with its rating, inspection date, the three inspection scores, address, distance and a link to its page on the FSA site. Businesses that have opened but not been inspected yet show up as "awaiting inspection", which is a decent way of finding new openings.

Charity Commission register

You search by name, charity number, postcode area, income, what the charity does, who it helps or where it works. It reads the Commission's full register download, which they update every day and which covers all 170,000 or so registered charities in England and Wales.

You get back one row per charity with contact details, website, latest income and spending, its own description of what it does, and its causes and areas of operation. The whole register takes about 11 seconds to go through, so even big searches are quick.

Ofsted

You search by name, postcode area, council, region, phase or inspection outcome, for schools, early years providers or both. It reads the newest management information files Ofsted publishes on GOV.UK: monthly for state-funded schools and twice a year for early years.

You get back one row per school or provider. Schools inspected since November 2025 have their report card grades for each area (inclusion, achievement, leadership and so on) as separate columns, alongside the last overall grade from the old system and the latest ungraded inspection, plus a link to the report. Childminders' names and addresses are redacted by Ofsted, so those come back empty.

Running them

They're hosted on Apify. You can fill in a form and download the results as a spreadsheet, call them from your own code, put them on a schedule, or let Claude or Cursor use them as MCP tools. You pay per row through your own Apify account, fractions of a cent each, and rows that error aren't charged.

Everything comes from data published under the Open Government Licence. If you've spotted something wrong, or there's a register you'd want next, email me at admin@onibaku.co.uk.