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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Land use statistics in England: methodology changes www.gov.uk/government/c... consultation launched by MHCLG Changes to OS address data products have fuxored the time series, new taxonomy proposed

The new statistics will represent a break in the time series as represented by the legacy statistics from 2013 to 2022. This is unavoidable given the shift from the old LUCS classes to the new OS Tier A/B taxonomy, and in the underlying data from AddressBase/MasterMap to the NGD. The detail at which land is mapped, the way land use is determined, and the way features are grouped into sites all change because of these shifts. Figures from the new series should therefore not be directly compared with those published up to 2022, and we will be explicit about this in the publications.

We considered attempting to mitigate this break by approximately recreating the old LUCS categories from the new data. However, the cross-mapping required to do this would be the department’s own approximation, as the NGD does not natively support LUCS attribution. Given this, and the fact that not all LUCS categories have an obvious or consistent OS Tier A equivalent, such a cross-mapping risks creating a false sense of continuity and comparability between the old and new series that the underlying data cannot reliably support.

6:40 PM · Sep 17, 2026

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