It's not the whole UK - just England & Wales. ROS do the same job in Scotland (http://www.ros.gov.uk/); not sure about NI.
The land registry is woefully incomplete. Things only get into the registry when there's a change of ownership, and some land has been in the same family since the Domesday book. This was a problem when I used to work on software processing planning applications as some councils thought they could use the land registry to validate addresses.
The planning applications had great data in them if it could be opened up (eg they are generally submitted with a property boundary map!) but generally the councils wanted to either monetize this data or not release it at all; so you just get pdfs&metadata out, even when the user submitted in a vector format.
The land registry is woefully incomplete. Things only get into the registry when there's a change of ownership, and some land has been in the same family since the Domesday book. This was a problem when I used to work on software processing planning applications as some councils thought they could use the land registry to validate addresses.
The planning applications had great data in them if it could be opened up (eg they are generally submitted with a property boundary map!) but generally the councils wanted to either monetize this data or not release it at all; so you just get pdfs&metadata out, even when the user submitted in a vector format.