How the register is made.

Every licensing authority in Great Britain must keep a public register of the premises licences, club premises certificates and applications it deals with. They publish them in dozens of formats: search portals, spreadsheets, PDFs, and pages that need a UK connection to load. On Licence reads them every week and turns them into one consistent record per licence.

What we hold

205 of 355 authorities, 115,203 licences in force. Measured against the Home Office alcohol licensing statistics (England and Wales, 31 March 2024) and the Scottish Government liquor licensing statistics (31 March 2023), that is about 43% of all licensed premises in Britain.

How records are matched

Each licence gets a stable identifier from the authority, the kind of licence and the council's own reference, so a re-read of the same register updates the same page rather than creating a new one. Applications, variations and transfers are kept as history on the licence they belong to.

What we never do

We never delete a record because it vanished from one week's download. If a licence stops appearing, the page says so and keeps the history. We don't guess at missing numbers: a council we haven't read is shown as not collected, never as zero.

Licence holders who are private individuals are not named on this site, even where the council's register names them.

Corrections

If a record is wrong, the council's register is the authority, and we will match it. Email hello@onlicence.uk with the page address and what is wrong.