Find Your Patch — Which Council, MP, Police Force and NHS Body Cover a Postcode
A new patch, a tip from an address, or a story that crosses a boundary all start with the same dull question: who is actually responsible here? Getting it wrong sends an FOI to a body that does not hold the information.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
Find your patch
Enter any UK postcode to find the public bodies that cover it — the starting point for local reporting and FOI.
How it works
- You type a UK postcode and the page calls api.postcodes.io directly from your browser — no API key, no server round-trip, nothing stored.
- It reads six fields from the response and shows them as labelled rows: local authority (admin_district), Westminster constituency, ward (admin_ward), police force (pfa), NHS body (ccg) and region.
- Each row carries a one-line note on why a reporter cares — FOI and spending over £500 for the council, the register of interests and voting record for the MP, ward-level election results for the ward, data.police.uk and the police and crime commissioner for the force, board papers and performance data for the NHS body, and combined authorities for the region.
- It distinguishes a postcode that does not exist (“postcode not found”) from a failed lookup (“lookup failed”), and any field the data does not hold renders as an em dash.
When to use it
- Starting on a new patch, to build the list of bodies you will be filing against all year.
- When a tip arrives with an address and you need to know which council and force own it.
- Before addressing an FOI, to be sure the body you are writing to is the one that covers the area.
- Checking which side of a boundary a story sits on when two councils both claim it is the other one.
What it does not do
- The NHS row reads postcodes.io’s legacy ccg field. Clinical commissioning groups were abolished on 1 July 2022 and replaced by integrated care boards, so treat the name as a pointer to the right area rather than the current legal entity, and confirm the body before addressing an FOI to it.
- It returns names, not contacts. There is no FOI address, no publication scheme link and no councillor list — that legwork is still yours.
- Fields that do not exist for a given nation come back empty and render as a dash. Region is an English concept, and coverage of Northern Ireland is thinner than for Great Britain.
- It shows current boundaries as published through postcodes.io. It will not tell you that a constituency changed at the last boundary review, which is exactly the trap when comparing election results across years.
- It depends on a live third-party API. If postcodes.io is unavailable or blocked on your network you get “lookup failed” and nothing else — there is no offline fallback.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.