newGeoSure Insurance Product: UK Ground Movement Risk for Low-Rise Buildings

A geospatial dataset from the British Geological Survey assessing insurance risk from natural ground movement hazards across Great Britain. It combines six geological hazards—landslides, shrink-swell clays, soluble rocks, running sands, compressible ground, and collapsible deposits—into a unified rating for postcode sectors. The data is designed for use at a 1:50,000 scale with 50m ground resolution and is available in vector, 25m raster grid, and postcode-linked formats.

Use Cases

• Identify and estimate insurance risk for properties based on the combined hazard rating for postcodes.
• Assist regional planners in rapidly identifying areas with potential ground instability problems.
• Aid local government offices in defining land suited to different uses based on geological hazard susceptibility.
• Support developers, architects, and surveyors in preliminary site risk assessments for low-rise buildings.

Strengths

• Covers six specific geological hazards: landslides, shrink-swell clays, soluble rocks, running sands, compressible ground, and collapsible deposits.
• Provides national coverage across Great Britain.
• Data is available in multiple formats, including vector data, a 25m raster grid, and a Derived Postcode Database linked to postcode sectors.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset has been superseded, as noted in the description.

Provenance

Source

British Geological Survey (BGS)

Collection Method

Created by evaluating individual GeoSure data layers using statistical analyses and expert elicitation techniques.

Time Range

Version 7 2016.1 suggests a 2016 release, but temporal coverage of the underlying data is not specified.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-09 08:27:46.946783; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Great Britain