MoveCompass exists for one decision: where to live next. It's the biggest financial commitment most people make, and most of it still gets decided on adjectives. Nice area. Up and coming. A bit rough. We replace the adjectives with things you can check.
What you get
Enter any UK postcode and MoveCompass answers with official data for that exact spot: schools and their Ofsted judgements, recorded crime by month, GP surgeries and pharmacies, hospitals, transport links, food hygiene ratings, post and parcel points, EV charging, TV reception and who your MP would be. Each one is its own focused tool, and each number names the dataset it came from and when we last refreshed it.
There's also a full area report that pulls everything together for one postcode, a side-by-side comparison for when you're torn between two, a free moving checklist, and free MOT reminders for your vehicles.
How the data works
We load national datasets on their official release schedules — the Department for Education's school register, Ofsted inspection outcomes, police.uk street-level crime, the Food Standards Agency's hygiene ratings, NHS organisation registers, Ofcom coverage and transmitter data, HM Land Registry price paid data, UK Parliament's members data — and join them to a UK-wide postcode database. The work happens before you ask, which is why a search answers in seconds.
What we won't do
- We don't invent numbers. Every figure is traceable to a named source, and the source is printed beside it. Most are government or regulator datasets. Some are not, and we say which: shops, parks, post boxes and transport stops come from OpenStreetMap, contributed by volunteers; chargepoints from Open Charge Map; weather from Open-Meteo. Walking and driving times are estimates from straight-line distance, not measured routes. When we've wanted to build a tool and found no honest data behind it, we've dropped the tool.
- We don't hide the caveats. Police data anonymises crime locations to a nearby point, so a map pin is not an address. A hygiene rating describes one inspection on one day. Where a dataset has a known limitation, we print it beside the number rather than at the bottom in small text.
- We don't pretend to cover what we don't. Police.uk doesn't publish street-level data for Scotland, so our crime tool says "not covered" there. Showing an empty map would read as "no crime", which would be a lie by omission.
- We're not selling you an area. We don't sell houses, mortgages or leads. Good news and bad news get the same font size.
What it costs
A free account gives you three postcode searches a week, comparison of two postcodes, three saved areas and one vehicle in the MOT garage — every tool, with the same data premium members see. Premium raises the limits and adds alerts, email digests, history charts and PDF reports. It funds the site, which is why there are no ads and we do not sell your searches.
Who's behind it
MoveCompass is built and run in the UK by Aasim Ghaffar. It's our own product rather than client work, which is why we can be this stubborn about sourcing every number.
It's a small operation. The person who writes the code also answers the contact form, which is the main reason a wrong figure gets fixed the same week rather than going into a queue.
MoveCompass · info@movecompass.co.uk
Every dataset we use, with its licence and attribution, is listed on our data attributions page. If something looks wrong, tell us through the contact page — we'd rather fix it than have you trust a number that's out of date.