England Scrap Metal Dealer Licence Change Signals

Monitors the official Environment Agency-hosted Register of Scrap Metal Dealers. Live runs use the paginated default JSON collection; no per-registration detail fan-out is performed. Local authorities supply the data to the Environment Agency weekly and published dataset metadata describes a monthly cadence; timing remains controlled by the publishers.

Identity and signals

One registration resource is one licence entity. The final @id path segment is the stable registrationId; licence number alone is not used. Site addresses are a canonical set, so reordering, whitespace, case, postcode spacing, and exact duplicates do not create signals.

Implemented signals are LICENCE_ADDED, LICENCE_STATUS_CHANGED, EXPIRY_DATE_CHANGED, LICENCE_TYPE_CHANGED, HOLDER_DETAILS_CHANGED, SITE_SET_CHANGED, and LICENCE_NO_LONGER_LISTED. The current live collection exposes no explicit status value, so the Actor does not claim a typed revocation signal. If the official schema later supplies a status, literal status changes can use the implemented generic status signal.

One entity transition produces at most one signal with changedFields, before, and after. A missing record is not called revoked, expired, or closed; it becomes LICENCE_NO_LONGER_LISTED only after two consecutive complete, validated snapshots omit it.

Baseline, safety, and privacy

The first successful live run stores a full baseline and emits zero signals. Blank/duplicate registration IDs, blank licence numbers, failed pagination, near-empty results, major count collapse, or large-scale local-authority disappearance stop the run with no business signals and no snapshot mutation. Dataset and summary writes complete before snapshot commit.

mode=sample demonstrates changes through production transition logic without external HTTP or production snapshot access. Output is limited to public holder/business names, licence metadata, local authority, and public Site-licence addresses. Collector address absence is preserved; the Actor performs no address inference or contact, DOB, Companies House, director, or officer enrichment.

Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The generic JSON API metadata may display the Conditional Licence; the dataset-specific official record and Public Registers licence page identify Scrap Metal Dealers as OGL. This Actor is a monitoring aid, not legal advice.