UK Charity Commission Statutory Inquiry Watchdog

Tracks new Charity Commission statutory inquiry activity as soon as it is published on GOV.UK: inquiries opened, class inquiries, Interim Manager appointments, and published inquiry reports. Built for journalists, charity-sector compliance teams, grant-makers doing due diligence, and researchers who need an early alert when a UK charity comes under formal regulatory scrutiny.

Data source

This Actor calls GOV.UK's own public Search API (https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json), the same API that powers the search box on gov.uk. It is:

• Free and keyless - no registration, no API key, no login.
• Not blocked by robots.txt - www.gov.uk/robots.txt disallows only the HTML search-results page (/search/all*); the JSON API endpoint used here (/api/search.json) is unrestricted.
• The Charity Commission's own announcements - results are filtered to the charity-commission organisation, so every row is something the regulator itself published, not a third-party summary.

No scraping, no HTML parsing, no terms-of-service workaround.

What it collects

For each search phrase (default: "statutory inquiry", "opens inquiry", "class inquiry", "Interim Managers", "investigates charity", "inquiry report"), the Actor queries GOV.UK, keeps only Charity Commission results inside your date window, de-duplicates by URL, and pushes one dataset row per announcement or report with title, description, GOV.UK content format, published date and the direct URL.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
keywords	array of strings	6 phrases (see above)	Never leave empty - an empty list returns zero rows every run.
fromDate	string YYYY-MM-DD	90 days ago
toDate	string YYYY-MM-DD	today
formats	array	press_release, decision, corporate_report, news_story	Empty list = all formats including generic guidance pages.
watchLabel	string	-	Free-text tag stamped on every row.
maxItems	integer	100	Cap on rows pushed per run.

Output

One dataset item per matching GOV.UK item, e.g.:

{
  "type": "inquiry_item",
  "watch_label": null,
  "title": "Investigation launched into international aid charity over alleged links with Hamas",
  "description": "The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into...",
  "format": "press_release",
  "matched_keyword": "statutory inquiry",
  "published_at": "2026-08-07T10:38:25Z",
  "url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/news/investigation-launched-into-international-aid-charity-over-alleged-links-with-hamas",
  "status": "ok",
  "message": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-29T15:40:00+00:00"
}

Rows with "status": "ok" are charged under the pay-per-event model (event inquiry-item-found); a failed run pushes a single "type": "error" row free of charge with status set to the error kind (http_error, network_error, parse_error) and message describing it. An empty result (no inquiry news in the window) is normal and is not an error.

Suggested schedule

Daily. Statutory inquiry announcements are irregular but time-sensitive news - a daily run with a 24-48h fromDate/toDate window catches new items quickly without re-processing the same announcements.