About "The Government Says"

"The Government Says" make news releases from Government departments easy to find and easy to scan through quickly. It does this in order to help you, a British citizen, keep your finger on the pulse of what the government's up to. Without having to try to hard, and without having to rely on journalists telling you what matters.

Why?

Much of the news and information covered by The Government Says is "out there" and being discussed. But it is normally discussed without any reference to the original announcement, the result being that the media gets to say what a government announcement really 'means'.

I've also built it for lots of smaller reasons. For one, it's possible. For two, it's worth doing. For three, DowningStreetSays is cool and people like posting to it. And for four, it seems such a shame to have all this important information put out there, but to have nobody look at it, except in second-hand form.

And in the words of The Observer, it's "Great for sifting through the rubble on days when bad news is likely to be buried".

Other Data Sources

If you have a blog, why not write a post about an item of interest and then let the world know here? Just leave a comment saying "I wrote this...".

If you know of a further source of government news we should be including, please let help@thegovernmentsays.com know. Any submitted sites should preferably have an RSS feed of news. We've 'screen scraped' quite a lot of the data on this site, and built our own RSS feeds, but if your find is good enough, and it lacks an RSS feed we might scrape it for you.

Why are there duplicate entries?

We fetch feeds from multiple sources, some of whom may both issue the same release with different URLs; or a release is issued a second time with corrections.

RSS feeds

We have a list of sources and a aggregated feed of everything.

You can create custom feeds for certain search terms. Just use the search box to enter a term, hit enter, and subscribe to the RSS feed shown for that search.

How do I get in touch?

Email help@thegovernmentsays.com .

Who are you?

This was conceived and initially created by Sam Smith, working with the aid of a significant quantity of tea; and lots of assistance from Tom Steinberg, Francis Irving, James Cronin and the rest of the MySociety and democracy.org.uk collective.

What's the Copyright on this lot?

Most original data is © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C2006006049 (formerly C02W0005599). Material is reproduced from the original sources, but may not be the most up-to-date version, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright "The Government Says" 2004 - 2006.

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