About Institrace

Public records, made usable.

Institrace indexes what UK public bodies publish and attaches it on the identifiers those bodies publish. Committee papers, NHS organisations, officers, land titles and island filings sit on one index. You can search it, follow it, and compile a cited pack from it. Every line points at a paper that was already public.

We only index public bodies. A supplier, developer, or care-home company appears when a public paper or a published identifier attaches it. We do not run a private-company directory.

Records office reading room

The problem is not publication. It is access.

Public bodies in the UK have to publish committee minutes, registers of interests, spending records, decision notices and a long list of other governance papers. Most do. The problem is what happens next.

A minute uploaded as a scanned image cannot be searched. A spending spreadsheet three clicks inside a council website is invisible to most people. A register of interests published as a PDF cannot be checked against Companies House, the land register or an island filing without hours of hand work.

Accountability depends on information being usable, not merely available. When the same person sits on an NHS trust board, is a trustee of a national charity and directs a company that holds a public contract, that picture is only visible to someone who has looked in several places and connected them by hand. Most people cannot. Institrace puts those published records in one place.

We add nothing. We allege nothing. We make what is already there findable.

What we hold to

Four rules.

Access

A record that is published but cannot be searched is not accessible. A scanned image of a minute is not access. We turn what bodies publish into something a person can search, page by page.

Accuracy

We show what is there. We do not interpret, allege or draw conclusions. Every line links back to the original paper. What you make of it is your decision.

Completeness

Fragmentation is a form of obscurity. When the same person appears in a minute, a Companies House filing, a land title and an island paper, nobody can connect those by hand at scale. Published identifiers do it for you.

Permanence

Public records move and change. We keep a fingerprint of each paper when we index it, and the address of the body's own copy, so a reader can cite the version they read.

What we do, and what we do not.

We do

Collect the governance papers public bodies already publish, on a regular schedule
Turn image PDFs into searchable text
Attach officers, companies and land titles to the same person on a published identifier
Hold Crown Dependency and BVI papers beside UK bodies
Hold NHS organisation lists, published spend and published accounts on the same index
Draw the roles, companies and land titles on a person, company or body record as a network
Compile a cited pack from that record
Raise patterns for our own staff to review
Keep a fingerprint of each paper as it was indexed
Link every line to the original paper

We do not

Allege misconduct or draw conclusions about a named person
Publish anything that is not already in the public domain
Interpret. Analysis is the reader's job.
Treat a pattern for review as a finding
Run an investigative outlet. That is a separate function.
Set out to damage or embarrass anyone
Make a claim a primary public record does not support

Who uses it.

Anyone who needs to know how decisions about a public institution are made, by whom, and how those names sit against companies and land.

Journalists and investigatorsSolicitors running conflict checksCompliance and due diligence teamsResearchers in public policy and governanceCommunity and voluntary groupsAcademic researchersCouncillors researching their own authorityAnyone who wants to know how decisions about their area are made

Researcher and Practice start with a 14-day trial. A card is required. The public catalogue stays free. Pricing · Start a trial.

A note on intent

Institrace is infrastructure, not investigation. Public institutions are necessary, and most people inside them act in good faith. Accountability mechanisms exist because good intentions are not a substitute for oversight. Making those mechanisms work better is the point of this index.

Who runs it.

Institrace is published by Churchtown Media Ltd, company number 16960442, registered in England and Wales, with its registered office at 5 Cambridge Avenue, Southport, PR9 9SA. ICO registration number ZC124220. The index is built and run from Southport, Merseyside.

It is paid for by seats. There is no advertising on the site, and the public catalogue is free to read. How we handle personal data is on the privacy notice. How we treat the records is on Ethics.

Institrace publishes no investigations of its own. It holds what public bodies published and points back to them. Reporting is a separate function, and a story written from these records is the writer's, cited to the original paper.

Write to access@institrace.co.uk about a record, a correction, a seat, or a quote. If a record should not be here, or two records have been attached in error, say which and we will check it against the original.

Find the record. Follow the evidence.

Start with a public body. A seat opens the rest.

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