What government is doing
What government says it will do.
- 01the questionconsultations
- 02the announcementpress releases and news
- 03the commitmentyou are here
- 04the instructionguidance and regulation
- 05the accountwhat government discloses
A policy paper is a department saying what it intends to do, and why. It is the nearest thing to a promise you can hold it to later.
More about this source
GOV.UK lists them newest first, and this year that list runs to — documents from — departments, agencies and regulators.
Except that "newest" is doing some work. The date GOV.UK shows is the day the page was last touched, not the day the policy was written. Sort the list by it and a paper drafted years ago, opened to fix a broken link, sits above one published this morning.
So this page splits the two apart. — of the papers in the 2026 feed were actually written this year. The other — — — of the list — are older documents that have simply been re-dated, the oldest of them first published in —.
This is stage three of What government is doing, the nearest thing government publishes to a promise with a date on it. Before it come the question and the announcement; after it, the instruction that lands on a desk and the record of government’s own running. What the promise was forecast to cost, and who marked that forecast, is Whether it worked.
How old is it
A year's policy, by the year it was written.
Each bar is the year a paper was first published. Everything here carries a 2026 date; only the bottom bar was written in 2026.
Click a year to filter the source below. The median re-dated paper is — years old; the oldest is —.
Why this matters
None of this is a scandal. Papers get amended because circumstances change, and a department that never revisits its own policy is not obviously doing better than one that does.
But it does make the feed a poor guide to what is new. If you monitor government output — and a lot of people are paid to — the reverse-chronological list will hand you the same document twice a year and give you no way to tell a rewrite from a corrected typo.
That is what the change note is for. Departments have to write one every time they amend a published paper, and it is the only plain-English account of what actually changed. — of the papers here have been amended at least once since publication, — times between them. The rest — — of them — have never been touched since the day they went up.
Each card below carries its change note in full, next to a plain reading of what kind of change it describes.
The source
Every paper, with its real age.
Describe what you do and the source narrows to your subject. Or search the text, filter by where a paper came from, who published it and what changed, and group the results however you find useful.