About StreetOwl

StreetOwl.co.uk answers a simple question: what's going on where you live, and how does it affect you?

Type in a postcode and you get the things that actually affect your day — from river warnings to planning applications on your street, and everything in-between.

It's free. There's no subscription, no paywall, no "premium tier" holding the useful bits back. You don't need an account. If you make one, it's so your saved places follow you from your laptop to your phone — nothing more.

Where the numbers come from

Almost everything here is public information that you already own. It's collected by the Environment Agency, the police, your council, the Office for National Statistics, National Highways, the Department for Transport and others, published under the Open Government Licence, and paid for by your taxes. The problem was never that it didn't exist. It's that it lived in forty different places, most of them hard to find and harder to read.

All StreetOwl does is fetch it and put it in one place.

Every card names its source. Every figure carries the date it was published, not the date you happened to look. When a source is stale or unreachable, the card says so rather than quietly showing you last week's number as though it were today's. Where we link out, the link goes to the original — your council's own planning portal, the publisher's own article — not to a copy of it here.

Some of the data comes from volunteers rather than government: planning applications are aggregated by PlanIt, election candidates by Democracy Club. Both are free public services run by people who could be doing something more lucrative. They're credited wherever their data appears, and they deserve it.

No political affiliation

StreetOwl isn't funded by, affiliated with, or working on behalf of any political party, campaign, think tank or lobby group.

On contested subjects the rule is the same throughout: report what named, independent bodies have actually said, name them, date it, and link to them. Describe a situation and its documented causes — never assign blame. Where two parties are in dispute, both are described in the same words. If you can tell what I personally think about immigration, taxation or anything else from reading this site, I've failed at the one thing I set out to do.

You are perfectly capable of forming your own view. You just need the numbers in front of you, and to know where they came from.

What we hold about you

You don't need an account to use StreetOwl, and if you don't make one we hold nothing about you at all.

If you do create an account we store your email address, your display name as Google or Microsoft report it (shown on the games scoreboard instead of your email), which provider you signed in with, and the postcodes you chose to save. That's the entire list. You can delete all of it yourself, immediately, from the account panel — no email, no waiting.

If you tap "use my location", your phone asks your permission and then hands the coordinates to the page in your browser, which uses them once to look up the nearest postcode. They are not sent to us, not logged, and not stored anywhere. Typing a postcode instead works exactly the same.

One exception, clearly signposted where it happens: if you play the Striker Force Express game while signed in, we share your email address with Striker Force (strikerforce.co.uk — run by the same person as StreetOwl) so your team can be saved to you and follow you across devices. That is the only thing shared, it only happens when you play signed in, and playing signed out shares nothing at all — your team just stays in your browser.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn't

The live data on this site is never written by AI. Flood warnings, crime figures, bus times, planning applications — those come straight from the source and are displayed as published.

AI is used in exactly one place: drafting the weekly "The economics of…" articles and the monthly World View refresh. Those drafts are checked against the original sources and published by a human — me — or they don't go up. I'd rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder.

When we get it wrong

We will, occasionally. A council will change a URL, a feed will report something odd, or I'll misread a figure. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I'll fix it and say what changed. A dashboard nobody can correct isn't worth trusting.