UK Insolvency Notice Monitor — The Gazette

Watches The Gazette (the UK's official public record) for new insolvency notices and, on every scheduled run, emits only the notices published since the last run — deduplicated, with the company name/number and a direct link. Optional webhook POST to Slack, Zapier, Make or n8n.

Choose corporate insolvency (winding-up, administration, liquidation, receivership), personal insolvency (bankruptcy orders, IVAs), or all.

Who it's for

Buyer	Use
Debt collection / recovery agencies	New corporate liquidations = act before the pool of assets shrinks
Credit insurers & credit-control teams	Real-time risk signal on customers and their customers
Insolvency practitioners / turnaround advisors	Petitions to wind up = a company that may still be saveable
Commercial landlords & suppliers	A tenant/customer entering administration, the day it's gazetted
Competitors	A rival winding down — their customers and staff are in play
Journalists & researchers	Company-failure rate by sector or region
Asset buyers / auctioneers	Liquidations mean plant, stock and IP coming to market

Quick start

1. Paste nothing — there is no API key. The Gazette is a free public record.
2. Pick a scope (corporate / personal / all) and optionally a text filter (a town, a sector keyword, an insolvency practitioner's name).
3. Run once to seed state (firstRunLookbackDays controls the backfill).
4. Schedule it (Apify Console → Schedules) — daily, or a few times a day for speed-to-lead. Later runs are incremental automatically.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
scope	corporate | personal | all	corporate	Which insolvency notices to track.
text	string	—	Optional free-text filter across the whole notice (company name, town, court, practitioner).
includeDetail	boolean	true	Fetch each notice's linked-data record for company number / court / case number (1 extra request per notice).
firstRunLookbackDays	integer 1–30	3	First run only: how many days of notices to fetch.
webhookUrl	string	—	POST {source, scope, window, count, notices[]} here each run.
maxResults	integer 1–5000	500	Cap per run. Excess rolls to the next run.

Output

One dataset item per new notice:

Field	Example
notice_id	"5203210"
notice_code	"2441"
notice_type	"Resolutions for Winding-up"
is_corporate	true
title	"TRINITY EUROPE LIMITED"
published	"2026-09-03T01:05:22"
company_name	"TRINITY EUROPE LIMITED"
company_number	"06763121"
court	"High Court of Justice" (when in the notice)
case_number	"CR-2026-001234" (when in the notice)
registered_office	(when in the notice)
notice_url	https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/5203210
scraped_at	"2026-09-03T09:00:00.000Z"

Webhook payload

POST <webhookUrl>
{ "source": "uk-insolvency-monitor", "scope": "corporate",
  "window": { "from": "2026-09-02", "to": "2026-09-03" },
  "count": 7, "notices": [ /* same objects as dataset items */ ] }

Webhook failure is logged, not fatal — the data is still in the dataset.

How incremental mode works

Cross-run state (seen notice IDs + last-run time) lives in a named key-value store, uk-insolvency-monitor-state, namespaced by a hash of scope + text so multiple schedules on this actor keep separate state. Runs after the first fetch from the day before the previous run up to today (Gazette publish dates), then drop every notice ID already seen. The seen-set is capped at 30,000 IDs (~2 weeks of all UK insolvency notices).

Notes on The Gazette API

• No key, no auth, free — data published under the Open Government Licence.
• The API returns intermittent HTTP 500s; this actor retries transient failures (3 attempts, exponential backoff) and, if it still fails mid-run, pushes what it has and resumes from there next run (partial: true in the summary).
• Corporate vs personal is a client-side filter on the notice code (24xx = corporate, 25xx = personal) because the Gazette search API only accepts one notice-type per request.

Local development

npm install
npm test    # 15 unit tests, fully mocked
echo '{"scope":"corporate","firstRunLookbackDays":3}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
npm start

Deploy your own copy

$npm i -g apify-cli && apify login && apify push

Data source & licensing

Data comes from The Gazette (thegazette.co.uk), the UK's official public record of record, published by The Stationery Office on behalf of HM Government. Notices are Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Related actors

Part of a small suite of UK public-register monitors, same publisher, same pattern (incremental, no duplicates, webhook-ready):

• UK New Company Monitor — new incorporations by SIC / location
• UK Food Business Monitor — new food businesses + hygiene-rating changes (FSA)
• UK Public Tender Monitor — public-sector tenders by CPV / value (Contracts Finder)
• UK Company Change Monitor — watchlist diffing: status, charges, officers, filings

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Changelog

• 0.1 — Initial release: corporate/personal/all scope, text filter, incremental dedup, notice-detail enrichment, webhook, transient-error retry.