UK Ground Risk API - Coal Mining, Brine, Subsidence

Ask whether the ground under a UK address is a problem, before a conveyancing search tells you it is.

What it collects

• Ground risk screening: whether a location carries a coal mining risk, a non-coal mining risk, a brine risk or a ground stability issue, answered as clear flags for a point or a polygon.
• Mining risk detail: the same four subjects with the detail behind them, including the named mining types identified at the location and the minerals associated with each, which is what turns "a non-coal risk exists" into something you can act on.
• Spatial features: the provider's mapped environmental datasets as GeoJSON over a bounding box, with every attribute the dataset carries, returned in British National Grid, WGS 84 or Web Mercator regardless of which one you asked in.
• Product catalogue: what your account can order, with each product's name, code, price and delivery time.
• Your own account history: orders with their status, customer reference, location and completion date, the documents and JSON report findings attached to them, your invoices with totals, tax, currency and report counts, and your organisation record.

FAQ

What is UK ground risk data used for?

Deciding whether a property needs a full environmental search, and pricing the risk when it does. Coal mining, brine extraction and historic non-coal workings are the subsidence risks that stop UK transactions, and screening an address for them takes seconds where ordering a report takes days. Conveyancers, lenders, insurers and developers all use the screen the same way: to triage a list down to the addresses that actually warrant the paid report.

What is the difference between the screening and the detail service?

The screening service answers four yes-or-no questions about a location: coal, non-coal, brine, ground stability. The detail service answers the same four and adds the mining types identified there and the minerals behind each one, so a non-coal finding arrives with the reason. Run the screen across a list, then run the detail on the ones that came back positive.

Does a "false" mean the data is missing?

No, and this actor is careful about the difference. A false flag is the provider saying it checked and found no such risk at that location, which is the answer most callers are paying to get. A location it holds nothing at all for is a separate row that says so in plain words. Nothing turns a clear result into a blank.

How do I give it a location?

One per line, either a latitude,longitude pair or a well known text geometry such as POINT(-0.1387 50.8233) or a POLYGON. Well known text is the provider's own preferred form and is passed through untouched. Pairs are written latitude first, the way people write coordinates, and converted to the longitude-first order the geometry format expects, so a pair typed the natural way cannot silently become a real place somewhere else.

Which coordinate system does it use?

Whichever you choose, on both ends, and both travel on every row. The provider accepts British National Grid, WGS 84 and Web Mercator, and it will return the geometry in a different projection from the one you asked in, which is how you supply latitude and longitude and get British National Grid back. Both are recorded because the first two put the same numbers kilometres apart, and a coordinate that did not travel with its projection would not be a location at all.

Can this actor order a report and spend my money?

No. The provider publishes routes that create an order and change an organisation's settings, and none of them is wired up here. Every route this actor can reach is a read. That is a deliberate limit, because a scheduled run that could buy reports is a scheduled run that eventually will.

Can I read the findings from reports I have already bought?

Yes, which is the point of the account services. The order services list what you have ordered and the documents on each one, including the simplified JSON version of the report findings, so a report you paid for once becomes structured data you can query rather than a PDF in an inbox.

Why did a refusal tell me it was an actor bug rather than my key?

Because the gateway in front of this API answers two completely different problems with the same HTTP 403: a refused key, and a path that does not exist. Only the response body separates them. The actor reads the body, so a routing mistake on its side is reported as its own fault instead of sending you off to reissue a credential that was fine all along.

Do I need my own API key?

Yes. This actor is bring-your-own-key and never ships a key of its own. Paste your key from your provider account, or set it once as the DATA_API_KEY environment secret. The risk and account services take it as a header; the spatial data host only accepts it as a query parameter, because that host also serves map tiles to browsers, and the actor sends whichever each host expects rather than both.

What does it cost?

Pay per result. A ground risk screening row costs the most, because one row is a full answer about a location; a mapped feature costs well under half that, because a single area commonly returns many; reading your own orders and invoices costs less again; and the product catalogue is priced near zero, because finding out what something costs should not itself cost anything worth counting. Platform usage is included. Locations the provider holds nothing for are never charged.

Example output

{
  "recordType": "risk",
  "service": "miningRisk",
  "requested": "50.8233,-0.1387",
  "found": true,
  "inputProjection": "4326",
  "outputProjection": "4326",
  "coalRisk": false,
  "nonCoalRisk": true,
  "nonCoalTypes": ["Hydrocarbon"],
  "brineRisk": false,
  "groundStabilityRisk": true,
  "record": { "...": "every field the provider published, unchanged" }
}

Keyword map

UK ground risk API, coal mining risk search, non-coal mining risk, brine subsidence risk, ground stability data, mining search API, environmental search data, conveyancing search API, UK property risk screening, subsidence risk by postcode, GeoJSON environmental data, British National Grid API, land use data UK, contaminated land screening, property due diligence API, mining report findings JSON, historic landfill data, UK environmental risk data API.