 I'm Gavin Chait from a company called Whitehawk and my company specializes in open data consulting all over the world. At the beginning of the year and end of last year I started doing FOI requests to every single local authority and asking them please provide me with a complete list of all the commercial properties as well as the vacancies so let me know exactly which ones are empty and which ones are not. One of my things is just you know having a particular interest in entrepreneurship is that I find it cripplingly painful and horrible when I see someone sitting in an empty shop and suffering and they should never have been here in the first place. The objective is to make the same sort of intelligence that big businesses use make available free of charge via intermediaries like Zoopla to any person starting a small business. Without FOI there was no mechanism to approach local authorities to request the data and no legal mechanism for me to be able to have some authority as someone who has other than pulled with any local authority and I've got no sort of commercial reason or should I say no legal reason to simply go in there and say hey you know give me all your data without FOI. As a novice without any idea of how FOI works and of what the process is the platform is tremendous I mean it's just step by step you start here and at the beginning I mean I feel like a pro now because I've done you know 350 requests I think I've done a fair number that have gone right through the entire process including the various legal steps but at the time I had no idea what I was doing and to have something that already has the complete database of everybody you need to contact already has a very structured way of simply doing it as well as recommendations of how to structure a request is really really helpful and the team are incredibly responsive and so when I had a query of is this normal I just got this response and it doesn't make any sense to me and have someone go oh yeah yeah they're like that it's great. I ran a non-profit organization for 10 years doing small business consulting and my experience is that small businesses do not pay for intelligence they prefer to just kind of wing you know they put down their deposit they take a five year lease or they go and sometimes they discover after they're stuck in a five year lease that this is a really terrible area for their type of business. The idea is that with time we build a sufficiently strong database of information that is available to business startups so that we can reduce that that business risk and businesses can gain additional insights in advance of any problems turning up. During the discovery process when you're looking for rentals when you're looking for a new factory looking for a new office space or a new retail space you flip over the card for the empty property and on the back you basically see right you'll need to hire this number of staff your rental is likely to this your rate select this and this is what you're gonna and we looking at this either recommend or don't recommend this sites for tenants and that's kind of the long-term objective. Another thing we don't know or didn't know at the time was which of the properties are empty which of the properties are actively trading as businesses and as much as we hear about the anti-high streets problem and there's a lot of research in that area there's no comprehensive open data database of property activity you can get if you have deep pockets if you're one of the big chains or one of the big companies international firms they spend millions of dollars a year buying business intelligence buying information on property availabilities so we're specifically requesting empty commercial property information you'll hear numbers in media and the press about you know 10% of properties 5% of properties 25% of properties could be vacant in a particular local authority but there's no dates from that. Most local authorities do not publish this data so quite a few you know I think I basically spent I think a month just looking through every single local authorities website to try and assess I'd give you a sense of the 350 local authorities in England and Wales and I looked at each of them to see whether they're really published and if so what what do they publish do they publish the right information I think there's only like 5 to 8% of them already publish this type of commercial property data even though most recognized this is one of the more popular requests