The observation
The UK publishes an extraordinary quantity of data for public re-use. Energy performance of nearly every building. Company ownership and filings. Licensing applications, planning decisions, procurement awards, safety registers.
Almost none of it arrives in a form anyone can act on. It is distributed as multi-gigabyte archives, or behind search interfaces built for looking up one record at a time, or in schemas that assume you already know what the codes mean. The information is genuinely public and genuinely free, and it is genuinely out of reach for the people it would help most.
So the value is not in having the data. It is in the unglamorous work between the download and the spreadsheet: reading the licence, resolving addresses that were typed four different ways, deciding what to leave out, and shipping it on a schedule that can be relied on.
Why energy performance first
Because it is the clearest case of a public register describing a private obligation. Since 2018 the lowest-rated private rentals cannot lawfully be let, and government has confirmed a minimum of EPC C for private rented homes by 2030. That converts a large share of the rented stock into future mandatory spend, and the register already records which properties and what work.
Meanwhile the trades who do that work — assessors, insulation installers, heat pump engineers — mostly find it through referrals, shared enquiry sellers, and hope. The data that would tell them exactly which streets to walk has been sitting on a government server the entire time.
Where the name comes from
A town crier's job was to take official information that technically already existed — a proclamation, a bylaw, a notice nailed to a door in a language most people could not read — and make it land with the people it actually affected.
That is the same job. The bell in our mark is built from the ruled lines of a register, which is about as neatly as the whole idea can be summarised.
Who is behind it
CrierData was founded by Luke Davies and is run from Suffolk. You will be dealing with the person who builds the pipeline, writes the filters and answers the email — which is why replies are fast, why unusual questions get real answers, and why the caveats on this site are more candid than a marketing department would allow.
Our company details are published in full in the footer of every page, and on the Companies House register. We would rather you check.
How we intend to grow
By adding registers, not by adding fields to the ones we have. Energy performance is the first dataset because the regulatory driver is unambiguous and the buyers are identifiable. Others will follow the same route: read the licence, establish what can lawfully be built, prototype it, and only then decide whether it is worth selling.
What will not change is the boundary. We compile public records into products. We do not identify individuals, we do not enrich contact details, and we do not sell anything we could not explain to the register's publisher without embarrassment.