Guidance

Available coal mining data sets

Published 28 November 2024

Data set	Description
Area for Mining Report Intervention [footnote 1]	Polygons describing areas where the automatic issue of a Coal Authority mining report is prevented due to a requirement for manual intervention.
Child Phase	Identifies the chronology of estimated or calculated divisions of a Proposed Parent Phase: the combination of Parent and Child Phase allows the reporting of Past, Current and Future mining.
Coal Authority subsidence damage claim [footnote 1]	A claim for subsidence damage caused by coal mining.
Coal Mining Related Hazards [footnote 1]	Sites or properties that have either been subject to investigation or remedial works by the Coal Authority under its Emergency Hazard Call-Out Procedures.
Coal Outcrops	The intersection of an underground coal seam with rockhead, indicating coal that may have been worked at some time in the past.
Coalfield Consultation Areas	Areas in which the Coal Authority recommends that a mining search report is required for property conveyancing or development purposes.
Country	Scotland boundary polygon.
Court Order	An order issued by the court to work coal where no previous mining lease was in existence.
Court Order Amendments	An amendment made to an order issued by the court to work coal where no previous mining lease was in existence.
Geological Disturbance - Fissures and Breaklines	Shows lines of weakness at the surface (Fissures and Breaklines) which may have been produced and/or modified by coal mining.
Geological disturbance - Faults	A line of discontinuity in bedrock where rocks have moved relative to each other.
In Seam Level Contours	Shows the level of underground working in metres at along a specific contour, in a specific seam, above or below Ordnance Datum.
In Seam Levels	Shows the level of underground working in metres at a specific point, in a specific seam, above or below Ordnance Datum.
Legal Notices	A withdrawal of support notice served on the public by coal operators as a legislative requirement.
Licence Areas	A licence granted by the Coal Authority to a licensee to extract coal.
Licence Table	A table of unique Licence references derived from the Authority’s coal mining data base.
Licensed Roadways	An underground roadway connecting two areas of working. The same as a spine roadway but exists in an area where coal mining has been licenced by Coal Authority since October 1994.
Licensee Area Of Responsibility	Shows the geographic area within with a licence operator is responsible for the effects of its mining operations, with particular regard to subsidence claims.
Mine Entries	Showing the positions of over 172,000 coal mine entries in England, Wales and Scotland.
Mine Gas [footnote 1]	A site or property that has either been subject to investigation or remedial works by the Coal Authority to deal with an actual or potential mine gas occurrence.
Parent Phase	Records the chronology of an underground working, proposed or actual (a Parent Phase will typically start life as ‘proposed’ and as coal is extracted over a period of time it will become ‘actual’).
Probable Workings	The locations and estimated extents of probable underground workings for which no recorded plan exists, but where it is likely that workable coal at shallow depths has been mined before records were kept.
Seam Table	A table listing local seam names and corresponding unique Coal Authority Codes.
Section 46 Notices	A notice of proposals relating to underground coal mining operations under Section 46 of the Coal Mining Subsidence Act 1991 (as amended by the Coal Industry Act 1994).
Shallow Workings	The shallow coal workings dataset is derived from the Authority’s records of underground coal mine workings. This dataset has been created by extracting all those underground workings, or parts thereof, whose depth is 30 metres or less from the surface
Site Investigations [footnote 1]	Sites that have either been subject to investigation or remedial works by others under the procedures set out in the Coal Authority’s Permits process.
Spine Roadways	An underground roadway connecting two areas of working.
Underground Workings	Identifies areas where coal has been mined, or is currently being mined under the surface.
Unlicensed Opencast	Contains the locations and extents of pre Coal Authority worked opencast sites i.e. as worked by National Coal Board or British Coal.
Working Dates	Identifies the year the coal was mined at a geographic position in a specific seam.

1. These data sets are only available for ‘Use’. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵