What government is doing
What government tells you to do.
- 01the questionconsultations
- 02the announcementpress releases and news
- 03the commitmentpolicy papers
- 04the instructionyou are here
- 05the accountwhat government discloses
Guidance is what government tells you to do: what to record, how to apply, what counts as compliance, what happens if you get it wrong. It is the part of government most people actually meet.
More about this source
GOV.UK's guidance and regulation feed carries — documents with a 2026 date. Sorted newest first, that is what a compliance officer sees.
Only — of them — — — were written this year. The other — are older guidance that has simply been re-dated, and this page leaves them out. What is left is the genuinely new instruction: — documents from — departments, agencies and regulators, across — of GOV.UK's own document types.
— of them are statutory guidance — the kind you are required by law to have regard to. The rest range from a detailed guide to a one-line notice, and GOV.UK does not rank them.
This is stage four of What government is doing, and the end of the line: the document that tells you what to do. Behind it sit the question, the announcement and the promise; alongside it, what government discloses about its own running. Whether any of it was worth the cost is the subject of Whether it worked.
How long it stands
Published this year, rewritten this year.
Each bar is a month's batch of new guidance. The lime part is how much of that batch has already been amended — not in some later year, but inside the same one it went up.
amended since publication still as published
Click a month to filter the source below. Read the lime share down the column rather than across it: January's batch has had the whole year to be amended and the newest has had weeks, so the share tapers for that reason alone. It is exposure, not a trend.
Why this matters
Guidance is meant to be the settled part. A consultation closes, a decision is taken, and guidance tells everyone affected what to do about it. If it moves, they have to move with it.
— of this year's — new documents — — of them — have already been amended at least once, — times between them. For half of those, the most recent change came within — days of publication; — had been amended and left alone again inside their first month.
Some of that is housekeeping: a broken link, an accessible version, a corrected date. Some of it is the guidance itself changing under people who have already read it. The only way to tell them apart is the change note the department has to write each time, so every card below carries its own in full, next to a plain reading of what kind of change it describes.
Is any of that a problem? Not on its own. But nobody publishes the churn rate, and it is the difference between guidance you can file and guidance you have to watch.
The source
Every new document, with what has happened to it since.
Describe what you do and the source narrows to your subject. Or search the text, filter by document type, who published it, what changed and when, and group the results however you find useful.