What government is doing
What government discloses about itself.
- 01the questionconsultations
- 02the announcementpress releases and news
- 03the commitmentpolicy papers
- 04the instructionguidance and regulation
- 05the accountyou are here
What government publishes about itself: what it spends, who it employs, what its boards decided. Some of it because the law says so. The rest because somebody asked, using the Freedom of Information Act — FOI, below.
More about this source
GOV.UK's transparency and freedom of information finder carries — documents with a 2026 date. Only — of them — — — were first published this year. The other — are older releases that have simply been re-dated, and this page leaves them out.
What is left is this year's disclosure: — releases from — departments, agencies and regulators, carrying — attached files between them.
One thing to get straight first.
Almost none of it was requested. — of these releases — — — are FOI responses, published because a member of the public asked a question. The other — went up on government's own timetable, whether anyone wanted them or not.
And the FOI half is not spread thinly across government. Just — bodies published a single FOI response on GOV.UK all year, and — accounts for — of them on its own. Most departments answer their FOI requests by email and never publish the answer here at all.
This is stage five of What government is doing, and the only one anyone outside government can start. The other four run to government’s own timetable: the question, the announcement, the promise and the instruction. The independent checks on all of it are in Whether it worked.
What it is about
The subjects government discloses on.
Each bar is a GOV.UK topic, longest first. The lime part is how much of that topic's disclosure came out because somebody asked for it.
answered a request published anyway
Click a topic to filter the source below. A release can carry more than one topic, so the bars add up to more than the source.
Can you actually open it?
A disclosure you cannot read is not much of a disclosure, and the file format is the difference between a figure you can use and a figure you have to retype.
— of this year's releases — — — come with a spreadsheet, a CSV or some other structured file. — come as PDF and nothing else. — have no file attached at all: the release is the web page, and whatever is on it is all you get.
None of that is a scandal on its own. A board minute belongs in a document; a spend return does not. But the split is worth knowing before you plan any work that depends on the numbers, because the difference between a CSV and a scanned PDF is a morning of somebody's time per file.
Filter by what you can open in the source below and you can see which bodies publish figures as figures.
The source
Every release, with what it comes as.
Describe what you do and the source narrows to your subject. Or search the text, filter by whether anyone had to ask for it, what format it arrives in, who published it and what it is about.