Court records and locations
We retrieve HMCTS court records and check postcodes to identify England and Wales locations. The directory includes open courts, tribunals and service centres. A contact-only or postal address is marked so visitors can check before travelling. Facilities and contacts reflect the source; a missing field is not treated as confirmation that a service is unavailable.
Nearby legal help
Nearby search uses postcode or court coordinates and straight-line distance, with a 30 km search radius. This is not a walking or driving distance. Town pages use the town recorded in the source, with separate nearby results where available. Law firm practice areas are reported at firm level.
SRA and Legal Aid Agency entries are separate datasets. An SRA registration does not establish that an office has a legal-aid contract. An office can appear more than once for different legal-aid categories.
Crime boundaries and reporting periods
Whole local-authority reports cover all 318 England and Wales authorities on ONS December 2023 geography. Greater London combines its 32 boroughs and the City of London. Town names without a matching authority boundary link to the containing authority, which is named explicitly. Police-neighbourhood reports use published Police.uk boundaries; court-area reports use a clearly labelled one-mile circle. These smaller areas can overlap and must not be added together.
We process 24 months from the latest Police.uk bulk archive. Authority records are assigned using the ONS 2021 LSOA-to-2023 local-authority lookup, with spatial assignment where an LSOA match is unavailable. Neighbourhood and court-area records are selected by anonymised coordinates inside their boundary. Non-empty duplicate crime identifiers are removed within each month. Records with no assignable geography cannot be included.
Population rates and fair comparisons
Annual rates equal the latest 12-month published territorial-force crime count divided by the ONS mid-2025 resident population, multiplied by 1,000. The numerator excludes anti-social behaviour and British Transport Police consistently in both years. BTP records still appear in monthly totals where published. This prevents missing transport-police submissions from creating a false trend. Rates use the same authority geography as the population. We do not estimate population for court circles or police neighbourhoods.
Rates and percentage changes are withheld when required months or territorial-force submissions are missing. Greater Manchester Police currently has no usable published series. An unavailable report does not mean zero crime. Rates describe published street-level records, not every recorded crime or a resident’s personal risk. Commuters, visitors, nightlife, reporting practices and population changes limit comparisons.
Categories, outcomes and maps
Monthly crime counts exclude ASB; the category table includes a separately labelled ASB row. Outcomes describe the latest supplied outcome attached to crimes reported in that month, not all decisions made during the month. Missing outcomes are labelled. ASB is excluded from outcome totals.
Police.uk anonymises locations before publication. Our interactive maps further group nearby published points into 0.001-degree cells, approximately 70–110 metres, without dropping located records. A marker is not an exact crime address. Authority totals may include LSOA-assigned records without usable coordinates that cannot appear on the map. Display boundaries are generalised for performance; statistical assignment uses the source lookup or full imported geometry.
Firm descriptions and public teams
Where a firm publishes usable public information, we retrieve a small selection of its own pages, respect robots restrictions and use AI to write a neutral summary. Each published sentence and team entry must carry evidence found in a source page. Automated checks reduce unsupported claims but do not replace the firm’s live information. Sources and check dates are displayed. Firm-level teams are not presented as staff at every branch. Legal-aid listings are linked to SRA firms only when the firm name and office postcode identify a unique match.
Refresh and validation
Scheduled imports check source structure and minimum record counts. A failed fetch does not erase the existing dataset. Court and legal-aid imports run weekly, SRA imports daily, and crime imports monthly. Source dates and check dates are different: checking an older publication does not make its contents new.
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