About
Transparency obligations are meaningless without access.
Institrace is a public records indexing platform. It does one thing: takes information that is already published by public bodies and makes it findable, searchable, and cross-referenceable.
The problem
Public bodies in the UK are required to publish committee minutes, registers of interests, spending records, decision notices, and a wide range of governance documents. Most do. The problem is not publication. The problem is access.
A committee minute uploaded as a scanned image is not searchable. A spending CSV buried three clicks inside a council website is not accessible to most people. A register of interests published as a PDF with no indexing cannot be cross-referenced against Companies House without significant manual effort.
This matters because accountability depends on information being usable, not merely available. When the same person sits on a BID board, directs a council-owned company, and chairs an oversight committee, the conflict is visible only to someone who has looked in three different places and connected the information manually. Most people cannot do that. Most journalists cannot do it at scale. Institrace can.
We do not add anything. We do not allege anything. We make what is already there findable.
Core values
01
Access
Public records should be actually accessible, not just technically published. A scanned image that cannot be searched is not access. Institrace converts what is published into what is usable.
02
Accuracy
We surface what is there. We do not interpret, allege, or draw conclusions. Every document links back to its original source. What you do with the information is your decision.
03
Completeness
Fragmentation is a form of obscurity. When the same person appears in six different registers across six different systems, that cross-reference is nearly impossible manually. Aggregation makes the picture complete.
04
Permanence
Public records are sometimes quietly amended, removed, or buried. We preserve a hash of every document at the time of indexing. Changes are logged. The record of the record is itself a record.
What we do and what we do not do
We do
- +Index publicly available governance documents on a regular schedule
- +Convert image-based PDFs into searchable text via OCR
- +Cross-reference named individuals and organisations across sources
- +Flag structural patterns — undeclared roles, connected-party transactions — for human review
- +Preserve document hashes so changes and deletions are detectable
- +Link every entry directly to the original source document
We do not
- −Allege misconduct or draw conclusions about named individuals
- −Publish documents that are not already in the public domain
- −Interpret findings — analysis is the reader's responsibility
- −Operate as an investigative outlet — that is a separate function
- −Seek to damage or embarrass any individual or institution
- −Make any claim that is not directly supported by a primary public record
Who uses Institrace
Anyone who needs to understand how decisions about a public institution are made, and by whom.
A note on intent
Institrace is infrastructure, not investigation. We believe public institutions are necessary and that most people within them act in good faith. Accountability mechanisms exist precisely because good intentions are not a substitute for oversight. Making those mechanisms work better is the purpose of this platform.