GB Biocide Article 95 Supplier Change Signals

Monitors the Health and Safety Executive's official GB Article 95 workbook and emits machine-readable changes affecting biocide supplier status, regulatory procurement monitoring, and market-access risk. HSE states that the official source is updated regularly.

This is a stateful change-signals Actor rather than a directory export. A first valid live run creates a zero-signal baseline. Later runs compare the complete official workbook with a persistent snapshot and emit only detected changes. An identical workbook emits no signals.

Signals

• ENTRY_ADDED: a previously unseen stable identity first appears as active.
• ENTRY_SUSPENDED: an active identity moves to the suspended worksheet.
• ENTRY_RESTORED: a suspended identity returns to active.
• ENTRY_REMOVED: a previously active or suspended identity disappears from current state and has new matching evidence in removed history.
• ENTRY_REINSTATED: an identity with previously observed removal history becomes active.
• ENTRY_DETAILS_CHANGED: meaningful non-key attributes change for the same identity and current state, including supplier-role changes.

Disappearance from ACTIVE or SUSPENDED alone never produces ENTRY_REMOVED. Unexplained missing identities are retained internally. A material unexplained-missing burst fails closed and retains the previous snapshot.

Stable identity and source handling

The stable identity is the SHA-256 representation of these normalized source fields:

1. the complete active-substance-name cell;
2. the deterministic sorted set of every CAS identifier;
3. the deterministic sorted set of every EC identifier;
4. Product Type, including an explicit null for genuine blanks; and
5. company name.

Supplier type, reasons, and dates are attributes, not identity fields. Supplier roles are represented as a deterministic set. The Actor does not use fuzzy company matching, infer company renames, forward-fill Product Type, or use worksheet row positions as identity.

The parser reads actual populated worksheet rows rather than relying on Excel Table boundaries. This matters because the observed Removed entries worksheet contains valid data below its formal Table range. Literal duplicate public source rows are normalized without creating business signals.

Expected worksheets and headers are validated before comparison. Production acquisition also rejects clearly collapsed parses below internal safety floors of 1,000 ACTIVE rows and 1,500 REMOVED rows; SUSPENDED has no positive minimum because it can legitimately reach zero. A material unresolved-missing anomaly requires both at least 25 identities and at least 2% of the previous current-state population. Fetch, workbook, schema, state, identity, anomaly, Dataset, or output-summary failure prevents snapshot advancement.

maxItems limits Dataset output only. It never truncates source acquisition, diffing, removal history, or the persisted snapshot.

Modes

• live discovers the current XLSX link from the official HSE landing page, validates the entire workbook, compares state, writes signals and OUTPUT, then commits the snapshot last.
• sample runs deterministic transition fixtures through the real normalize and diff logic. It performs no HSE request and never opens the production key-value store.

The sample demonstrates all six signal types. It is suitable for the example run without modifying the live baseline.

Source and reuse

Source: The GB Article 95 List — HSE.

Contains public sector information published by the Health and Safety Executive and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Open Government Licence exclusions and third-party rights may apply. No endorsement is implied, and the HSE logo is not used.