Ofgem Consultation Deadline Scraper

Export consultation closing dates and official statuses from Ofgem into an Apify dataset for regulatory calendars, supplier compliance teams and energy-policy monitoring. Get structured metadata with auditable source links instead of manually copying dates.

Coverage: supplied public consultation URLs, optionally supplemented by the recent links visible on https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/consultations. This version does not crawl the full archive, execute the JavaScript archive listing, or search Ofgem. It is a snapshot exporter, not a persistent change monitor. Schedule runs and compare exported rows in your own workflow if needed.

Quick start

Use the default input to discover recent consultations. For a reproducible example:

{
  "consultationUrls": [
    "https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/consultation/heat-network-regulation-authorisation-application-arrangements"
  ],
  "discoverRecent": false,
  "maxItems": 10,
  "status": "all",
  "publishedSince": "2026-10-01"
}

The example source was checked on 5 October 2026. It had publication date 2026-10-05, closing date 2026-11-02, source status Open, topic Heat networks, and four attached publication document links. Source content can change.

Input

• consultationUrls: up to 50 exact public HTTPS www.ofgem.gov.uk/consultation/slug URLs. Credentials, other hosts, ports, queries, fragments and arbitrary paths are rejected. Explicit URLs have priority.
• discoverRecent: defaults to true; reads only the recent main-page HTML links. Turn off for explicit URL-only runs.
• maxItems: 1–50 matching records, default 10. A maximum of 50 detail URLs are checked even when filters exclude many records.
• status: all (default), open or closed. Uses the label printed by Ofgem, case-insensitively. It does not calculate status from the deadline.
• publishedSince: optional inclusive YYYY-MM-DD filter. Records without parseable publication dates are excluded when this is set.

Output

One row per successfully parsed, matching consultation:

• title, publicationType
• publishedDate, closingDate: ISO dates or null. These are dates only; no deadline time/time zone is inferred.
• publishedDateRaw, closingDateRaw: source text, retained for audit and unusual dates
• status: source label or null
• topics: visible source topics
• sector: visible sector label, or null when absent. Topics are not silently substituted for sectors.
• documentUrls: links marked by Ofgem as attached publication documents; inline references are not included. Documents are never downloaded.
• sourceUrl, retrievedAt (UTC), warnings, attribution

Missing closing dates stay null. No deadlines, obligations or statuses are invented. This feed is informational and does not provide legal or regulatory advice.

Download dataset output as JSON, CSV or Excel through Apify. The default key-value store also contains RUN_SUMMARY with request counts, records, errors and the coverage limitation. Errors mark the run failed/incomplete; already exported rows are retained, so inspect the summary before relying on a partial dataset. An empty, error-free result can mean the chosen filters excluded the checked subset, not that Ofgem has no consultations.

Access, load and limits

Only public pages on the fixed Ofgem host are requested. The actor checks /robots.txt before pages and fails closed if unavailable, malformed or disallowing access. Requests are sequential with a two-second minimum gap, bounded response sizes and timeouts, and at most 52 total requests (robots, recent listing, 50 details). It does not follow redirects, retry denials, use login, download attachments, accept proxy input, solve challenges or use evasion. HTTP 401, 403 or 429 stops the entire source immediately. The runtime's normal networking transport is used.

A more restrictive crawl delay stops page requests. Changed HTML, unavailable pages and source access limits can prevent completion. Bulk historical coverage and automatic cross-run deadline/status change detection are not included.

Attribution and reuse

Contains public sector information from Ofgem licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. See Ofgem copyright and reuse terms. Third-party material is excluded from that licence; document URLs are supplied for reference, without copying their contents. Preserve attribution and source links when redistributing eligible metadata, and check rights before reusing linked materials.

Local development

Python 3.12:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

This uses Apify SDK local storage outside the platform. Supply INPUT.json in the default local key-value store, or use the Apify console input form after uploading/building the actor. No account secrets or external integration configuration are needed by the scraper itself.