Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department holds data on the number of public rights of way footpaths that have been removed from Ordnance Survey maps since 2015.

Ordnance Survey (OS) does not hold data which records the number of public rights of way footpaths that have been removed from OS maps since 2015.

From the 1 April 2015 to 31 January 2023 OS received 5,585 Orders for changes to the cartographic depiction of public rights of way from the relevant order-making authority, typically a Local Authority. 353 of these Orders included an instruction to make a deletion. It is possible that some of these orders for deletions were accompanied by an instruction to add a public right of way.