England & Wales Charity Register Change Signals

This is a change-intelligence Actor, not a current charity directory scraper. It compares successive official Charity Commission bulk extracts and emits only meaningful organisation-level changes.

Source and scope

The source is the Charity Commission for England and Wales full register download. The Charity Commission publishes a daily extract; this means the files are generated daily, not that every charity changes daily. The Actor uses the official charity, charity_annual_return_history, charity_classification, and charity_area_of_operation JSON ZIPs. All four must report the same date_of_extract or the run stops without replacing its snapshot.

Only main charities (linked_charity_number = 0) are primary entities. The stable public identity is registered_charity_number; organisation_number is retained only for safe joins. Linked/subsidiary charities are not independently emitted as primary entities in v1.

Signals

• NEW_CHARITY_REGISTERED: first appears as explicitly Registered in a normal comparison. It does not assert that the underlying organisation was newly formed.
• CHARITY_REMOVED: an explicit transition to Removed. It only means Register status changed to Removed; it does not imply dissolution, misconduct, merger, or regulatory action. A disappeared row is an error, never a removal signal.
• REGISTER_STATUS_CHANGED: other explicit registration-status transitions.
• CHARITY_NAME_CHANGED
• CLASSIFICATION_CHANGED and AREA_OF_OPERATION_CHANGED, with added and removed canonical set items. Row order is ignored.
• ANNUAL_RETURN_FILED: the latest stable financial-period/cycle filing identity first appears. Receipt-date or row-order corrections alone do not repeat the signal.
• REPORTING_STATUS_CHANGED: only the source field's explicit transition; the Actor does not calculate compliance.
• INCOME_CHANGED: a numeric latest-income change. It is observational only and is not an assessment of growth, health, risk, distress, or quality. Null transitions are suppressed.

Operation

On a fresh live store the Actor validates all sources, writes a complete compressed snapshot, emits zero Dataset rows, and reports BASELINE_INITIALIZED. An unchanged comparison is successful with zero signals. maxItems limits Dataset output only, never the snapshot. baselineOnly refreshes a validated baseline without emitting signals.

Schedule live mode daily after the source's usual publication window. Filters select signal types, charity numbers, statuses, classification/area text, and minimum income deltas. Filtering never changes the full snapshot.

Sample mode is deterministic and isolated: it makes no HTTP request, opens no production named store, changes no snapshot, and runs production diff/filter logic. It demonstrates eight core signal types with non-empty output. The input form defaults to live for real runs and prefills sample for a safe example.

Safety and limitations

The Actor checks HTTPS host, HTTP status, content type, minimum size, ZIP magic, JSON shape, required properties, unique main keys, extraction-date alignment, minimum counts, and a 40% relative count-collapse guard. Fetch, parse, validation, Dataset, or summary failure leaves the prior snapshot unchanged. The snapshot is committed last.

The Actor deliberately does not fetch trustee data. It drops all contact names, addresses, emails, phones, and other individual-level fields at the source-normalisation boundary. Results cover the England & Wales register and are not legal, financial, compliance, fraud, or funding advice.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Charity Commission for England and Wales. OGL exclusions, including third-party rights, continue to apply.

Output example

{
  "signalType": "INCOME_CHANGED",
  "registeredCharityNumber": "1234567",
  "charityName": "Example Charity",
  "previousValue": 100000,
  "currentValue": 125000,
  "absoluteDelta": 25000,
  "percentageDelta": 25,
  "sourceExtractDate": "2026-09-17"
}