Some doubts have been raised about whether this data is truly open, and a recent FOI request from Owen Boswarva further strengthens those doubts. See his blog post: http://mapgubbins.tumblr.com/post/107499166390/it-was-all-a-dream-land-registrys-price-paid .
Robert Whittaker raised this on talk-legal in November, but I now think that the talk-gb community needs to be aware of this. Although the answers to both the Open Addresses project and Owen Boswarva say that the Postcode Address File was used for a large percentage of the data, I am rather sceptical: - The nature of asking something explicit in an FOI request is that the answer will necessarily be legally conservative. In other words the answer is likely to be yes even if only a minor part of the data is affected. - The actual quality of the Prices Paid data is not of a standard I would expect for data which has been 'PAFed'. There are numerous examples of completely erroneous postcodes for a district, postcodes referring to more than one street, and vice versa. All of these are elementary things to check when cleaning address data. However, I would suggest that we avoid using the Prices Paid data until the position is clearer. My personal usage has almost entirely been to add postcodes, and then purely on the basis that the Prices Paid had fewer encumbrances than the ONS data. I shall revert to ONS and other Open Data sources for enriching OSM addresses with postcode data, and review source tags where I can identify the postcodes from other sources. If anyone is willing to write to their MP or the Minister responsible for Open Data, Sir Frances Maude, all the better. Jerry Clough
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