Amenities & broadband — methodology

1. Data sources, licence & cadence

The amenities section of a Home-Checker report draws on two independent UK datasets: OpenStreetMap for the location of nearby points of interest, and Ofcom Connected Nations for residential broadband availability.

1.1 OpenStreetMap (OSM) — points of interest

Data provided: Supermarkets, GP surgeries, hospitals, pharmacies, petrol stations, and railway stations within a fixed radius of the property.
Licence: Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL) v1.0.
Attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Refresh cadence: We re-import the UK extract from Geofabrik on a quarterly schedule. The map data itself is updated continuously by volunteers; our snapshot lags behind the live OSM database by up to 90 days.
Last imported: May 2026.

1.2 Ofcom — Connected Nations broadband

Data provided: Per-postcode availability of superfast (≥30 Mbps), ultrafast (≥100 Mbps), full-fibre (FTTP), and gigabit (≥1 Gbps) services, plus the percentage of premises currently below the 10 Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO).
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.
Refresh cadence: Ofcom publishes Connected Nations annually in September with a January update. We re-load the dataset within two weeks of each publication.
Last imported: January 2026 update.

2. What we do

For amenities we run a PostGIS spatial query against the OSM extract, finding the eight closest entries of each amenity type within a fixed search radius:

• 5 km radius for supermarkets, GP surgeries, hospitals, pharmacies, and petrol stations.
• 15 km radius for railway stations — rural OSM coverage of stations is sparser, and a tighter radius produces false “none nearby” results for properties on commuter routes.

Each amenity row reports the name, the amenity sub-type (e.g. supermarket → Tesco Express), and the straight-line (great-circle) distance in metres from the property centroid. We then deduplicate near-identical entries: OpenStreetMap routinely tags the same building twice — once as a node and once as a way — and our deduplication groups any two entries with the same name and type that sit within 100 m of each other, keeping only the closest one.

For broadband we look up the property's postcode in the Ofcom Connected Nations table and surface the four headline availability metrics, the USO shortfall percentage, and a roll-up status (available / partial / no availability) so the report card can be read at a glance. We also compute the outcode-level averages (e.g. all postcodes within BA13) so users can see how their specific postcode compares with the surrounding area.

3. What we do not do

Several things that look like they ought to be in this section deliberately are not. We list them explicitly so you know what gaps to fill from other sources:

• Travel time. All distances are straight-line metres from the property to the amenity, not driving, walking, or public-transport time. A school 500 m away across a river with no bridge will report as 500 m.
• Opening hours, accessibility, or facilities. We do not pull opening hours, disabled access information, parking, or any other operational attribute even when OSM has tagged it. Treat the listing as “a thing of this type exists at this location” — nothing more.
• Mobile coverage. Ofcom publishes mobile-signal data in the same Connected Nations release, but the V1 report does not include it. The mobile coverage block in the report payload is a deliberate placeholder — it is not a data gap or a bug.
• Schools. Schools are reported in their own dedicated section using GIAS + Ofsted data. They are not duplicated here.
• Live broadband line-test. Ofcom availability is operator-reported and reflects what could be delivered at the postcode. We do not run the actual line check that an ISP runs against a specific address before activation.

4. Known limitations

The amenities section is the most ETL-heavy in the report, and the underlying data has well-known shortcomings that we want you to be aware of.

• OSM is a wiki. OpenStreetMap is contributed and edited by volunteers. Coverage is excellent in dense urban areas and weakens in rural England. A pharmacy that closed last week may still appear; a clinic that opened last month may not.
• Tag inconsistency. Different contributors use different tags for the same kind of place. We map the most common tag combinations onto our amenity categories, but a small number of legitimate sites are inevitably missed because they were tagged in a way our query does not recognise.
• Distance ≠ accessibility. A 1.2 km hospital across a railway cutting may be a 4 km drive. A 600 m supermarket up a 1-in-6 hill may be a 25-minute walk for someone with mobility limitations. The number is a proxy, not a route.
• Postcode-level broadband ≠ address-level broadband. Ofcom reports availability as a percentage of premises within a postcode unit. A postcode with 12 premises where 2 cannot get full fibre would show 83% FTTP — but if your address is one of the two excluded, your actual headline figure is 0%. Always verify against an ISP line-test before exchanging contracts.
• Snapshot lag. We re-import OSM quarterly and Ofcom on each publication. Between imports the live data has moved on. For amenity decisions with a long planning horizon (school place, GP registration), confirm directly with the provider before relying on our distance figure.

5. What this is not a substitute for

6. Disclaimer

The amenities section is general information only, compiled from third-party data under the licences listed above. It is not a recommendation, endorsement, or guarantee of any specific service or provider. For the full liability framework that governs every Home-Checker report, please read the Report Disclaimer. For attribution and licensing of every dataset we use, see Data sources & attribution.

Other module methodology pages: methodology index.