Postcode to council lookup: which council actually handles it?

Find the council by postcode with gov.uk's find your local council service: it takes a postcode and returns the council covering it, free. In much of England it will return two: a county council and a district, borough or city council, because those areas are two-tier and both councils cover the same address while doing different things. In a unitary authority, a London borough or a metropolitan borough it returns one, and in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland one council covers you.

Because much of England has two tiers of local government. gov.uk lists county council responsibilities as education, transport, planning, fire and public safety, social care, libraries, waste management and trading standards, and district, borough and city council responsibilities as rubbish collection, recycling, Council Tax collections, housing and planning applications. The two lists are not intuitive: roads are county, bins are district, social care is county, housing is district.

The county council in a two-tier area, because it is the highway authority. This is the single most misdirected service in English local government, because the road outside a house feels like the most local possible thing and is an upper-tier responsibility. In a unitary authority, a London borough or a metropolitan borough it is the same single council that handles everything else, with the exception in London of roads managed by Transport for London, which are a specific set of major routes rather than all of them.

The district, borough or city council in a two-tier area. Planning appears in both tiers' service lists, which is the source of the confusion: the county holds the development plan, minerals and waste planning and county developments such as schools, while the district decides household and most commercial applications. If you are extending a house, it is the district. In a single-tier area, one council does both.

A specific and narrow set of things. gov.uk lists allotments, public clocks, bus shelters, community centres and play areas, and notes they can issue fines for litter, graffiti, fly posting and dog offences. They cannot decide planning applications, though they are consulted on them, and they do not collect bins, maintain roads or provide social care. Where they are genuinely useful is on the land and buildings they own, and as a route into the larger councils, because a parish council's representations carry more weight than an individual's.

Generally not. gov.uk notes that in single-tier areas services such as fire, police and public transport are provided through joint authorities, and the same is broadly true elsewhere. Policing sits with a police force overseen by a commissioner or a mayor. Fire is run by a fire authority. Buses outside London are largely commercial, with the council or a combined authority responsible for service planning, supported routes and concessionary travel rather than for running them. The road itself, including street lighting, does remain a council responsibility.

No. The two-tier split is an English arrangement. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a single tier of principal councils, so one council covers your address. gov.uk's guidance on how councils work covers England and refers readers to separate government websites for the three other nations, whose service lists differ. Northern Ireland's councils in particular hold a notably narrower set of functions than councils in Great Britain, with several services delivered by central departments instead.