Data sources & licences
Everything on this site is rebuilt from the regulators’ own published registers, with open postcode geography for Great Britain and official population estimates for the care-density analysis. CareFacts does not treat possession of a file as permission to publish it.
| Dataset | Licence | Commercial use | Derivatives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Care Quality Commission care directory, ratings and inspection timelines | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
| Care Inspectorate Scotland Datastore | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
| Care Inspectorate Wales service directory | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
| RQIA Registered Services | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
| Great Britain postcode geography via postcodes.io | OS OpenData licence | Yes | Yes |
| ONS mid-year population estimates via Nomis | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
| ONS Countries (December 2024) Boundaries UK BUC | Open Government Licence v3.0 | Yes | Yes |
“Yes” means the recorded source terms allow CareFacts’ commercial reuse and transformed presentation, subject to attribution and the other licence conditions. It does not mean the source endorses CareFacts.
Attribution
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This includes information from the Care Quality Commission, Care Inspectorate, Care Inspectorate Wales, RQIA and Office for National Statistics. Source: Office for National Statistics. The source organisations have not endorsed CareFacts.
Great Britain postcode geography is supplied through postcodes.io. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2025. Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Contains NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
Excluded geography
postcodes.io states that commercial use of Northern Ireland postcode data requires a separate licence from Land & Property Services. No such licence is recorded for CareFacts, so BT postcode coordinates, distance results, maps, constituencies and derived council-area pages are excluded from public output. The RQIA register itself remains available under the Open Government Licence.
Current build inputs
- England
- CQC active locations, care directory and latest ratings; archived 2026-10-07
- Scotland
- Care Inspectorate datastore; archived 2026-10-07
- Wales
- Care Inspectorate Wales service directory; archived 2026-10-07
- Northern Ireland
- RQIA registered services via Open Data NI; archived 2026-10-07
- Geography
- postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory
Known gaps
- Compiled historical timelines currently cover Barchester’s current CQC locations in England. Other operators and the different Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish timeline formats have not yet been imported.
- RQIA publishes no summary ratings, so Northern Irish services carry inspection dates but no rating.
- Care Inspectorate Wales publishes theme scores rather than an overall rating, and around a third of Welsh services have no published scores yet.
- England’s local authority field is county-level as CQC publishes it; Scotland and Wales use open postcode geography.
- A small number of services registered in one nation operate from an address in another; they are listed under their regulator, not their postcode.
Corrections
If a service’s details are wrong here but right on the regulator’s site, the fix is a rebuild from source. If they are wrong in both places, the regulator’s own correction process is the only route that changes the record.