Fair use
House rules.
This page says how the site may be used, and it exists for three reasons. Serving it costs real money, and one automated visitor can cost more in an hour than a subscriber pays in a year. Some of our registers name real people doing their jobs, and that data was published for scrutiny rather than for selling to. And a free tier only means anything if it cannot be taken apart. These rules form part of the terms of use. Last updated 15 September 2026.
No automated access, and no bulk downloading
Use the site the way a person uses a site. Do not crawl it, scrape it, or drive it with a
script. Do not call our endpoints — /api/find, /api/ask,
/api/embed, /api/search or any other — from outside our own
pages. Do not download a register, or a substantial part of one, by any route.
This includes doing it slowly. Taking small pieces repeatedly until you have the lot is the same act with better manners.
We publish feeds for the things that are meant to be read by a machine. Use those.
Do not work round the limits
Free previews, search allowances and row caps are how the free tier is paid for. Do not get round them by clearing cookies, cycling through email addresses, using several browsers, sharing one account between people, or calling an endpoint directly to skip the counter.
We do not publish our rate limits, deliberately. A published limit is a target to sit just underneath. If you are using the site normally you will never meet one; if you meet one repeatedly, that is the answer to whether what you are doing counts as normal.
One account, one person
Accounts and seats are personal. Do not share sign-in links, passwords or seats, and do not pass results to people outside your organisation as a way of avoiding buying them access. If your team has grown, add seats — it is cheaper than the alternative and considerably less awkward.
The registers that name people
Our directories of officials, the ministerial meetings register, the parliamentary records and the judgments register name real individuals. Those records were published so that government can be scrutinised, and that is the only thing they may be used for here.
You may not use them to build a marketing list, to profile individuals, to send unsolicited approaches to people whose names you found here, or to assemble a dossier on somebody. Do not combine our data with other sources to identify or track a person.
This is the rule we enforce most readily, and the one where we will not give much benefit of the doubt.
Leave the machinery alone
Do not probe, scan or test the site’s security, try to reach data that is not yours, interfere with anybody else’s use of it, or attempt to get at the parts behind the paywall without paying.
If you find a security problem, please tell us at [email protected] before telling anybody else. We will thank you properly and we will not come after you for finding it.
What happens if you cross the line
Normally we will slow your access down, notice, and get in touch to ask what you are doing. Most of the time the answer is innocent and the fix takes a minute.
Where it is not innocent, or where it carries on after we have asked, we will suspend the account. For serious cases — bulk extraction, misuse of the data about named people — we will close the account without a refund and, where our rights have been infringed, take it further.
If you want to do more than this allows, ask
Nearly everybody who hits these limits is trying to do something reasonable. Researchers want a whole register for a study. A firm wants our data inside its own systems. Somebody wants to build a product on top of what we hold.
All of that is available, and none of it requires going round us. Email [email protected], tell us what you need and what it is for, and we will quote you for a bulk or API licence. Academic and public-interest research is often free.
We would much rather have you as a customer than as a problem.