Register of Private Water Supplies in Northern Ireland as of December 2019

The Drinking Water Inspectorate maintains a register of private water supplies for human consumption in Northern Ireland, as required by the Private Water Supplies Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2017. This spatial dataset represents registered supplies as 100m by 100m square polygons, created by the Government Digital Service on December 31, 2019. It includes supplies to public, commercial, or multiple private dwellings that are or were historically monitored.

Use Cases

• Map the distribution of private water supplies based on the polygon layer.
• Monitor compliance and historical coverage of water quality regulations based on the register.
• Assess infrastructure needs for areas reliant on private supplies based on spatial data.
• Integrate supply locations into environmental or public health dashboards based on the visualisation capability.

Strengths

• Data is explicitly tied to a legal requirement (The Private Water Supplies Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2017).
• Includes both current and historically monitored supplies, providing temporal context.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats (KML, ESRI SHAPE, GEOJSON) for interoperability.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; the dataset was superseded in April 2020, indicating it is not current.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.

Provenance

Source

Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), Northern Ireland

Collection Method

Registry compilation as required by regulation, with spatial representation as 100m squares.

Time Range

Snapshot as of December 31, 2019, includes historical records.

Freshness

Dataset creation date is December 31, 2019; it was superseded on April 24, 2020.

Geography

Northern Ireland