Every council in England and Wales keeps a public register of premises licences. It lists every shop, restaurant and takeaway licensed to trade and serve food late at night, and the exact hours each is permitted to open. It is public by law under the Licensing Act 2003. And in practice, almost nobody — including the people making licensing decisions — ever reads it.
The three weeks a public PDF could have saved
A dessert shop in Barking & Dagenham applied to open later — 2:30am at weekends. The licensing authority referred it to the Metropolitan Police, who proposed a 12:30am limit on the grounds that it was a residential area, and indicated that no other business was permitted beyond that point. A refusal was lined up, and a public hearing with councillors was scheduled.
Then the applicant did something the authorities had not: they opened the council's own public register. It showed around twenty premises in the borough already licensed to 2am or later — among them late-night food venues directly comparable to the applicant's, including a kebab house permitted well into the early hours. One comparable premises had been granted 2am hours only months earlier.
When that publicly available evidence was put in front of the police, the application was approved to 2:30am — no hearing required. The data that ended the dispute had been sitting in the council's own published register the entire time.
Why this keeps happening
The register exists. It is just unusable. It lives as a long PDF, or behind a portal that returns one premises at a time, with no way to ask the question that actually matters: which premises near here are licensed late, and until when? So the people who should rely on it — licensing officers, the police, and applicants — fall back on memory and assumption. Memory is inconsistent, and assumption is how an applicant gets told “nobody is licensed past midnight” in a borough with twenty premises licensed past 2am.
What we built
CouncilData aggregates these public registers into a single searchable tool. Enter an area and you see every premises and its permitted hours instantly — the precedent evidence an applicant currently has to dig out by hand, and that licensing authorities and police should have in front of them before forming a view. Start with the late-night licence finder.
It is public data. It always was. We are just making it usable — so the next applicant does not lose three weeks to a question the council could have answered from its own files.