The deal between us.

On this page: Who we are · What this is, and what it is not · Your account · Plans and paying · Changing your mind · Changes · What you may do with what you find · What belongs to whom · Fair use · Accuracy and availability · Suspension · Our liability · If something goes wrong · Law and courts

Who we are

Seam is a trading name of Futureworks Intelligence Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17458346, whose registered office is 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. In these terms “we”, “us” and “Seam” mean that company, and “you” means whoever is using the site.

Write to us at [email protected]. We answer within five working days, and usually sooner.

We are not currently registered for VAT, so no VAT is charged on the prices you see. If that changes we will tell you before it affects what you pay.

What this is, and what it is not

Seam gathers public records that UK government bodies, Parliament, the devolved legislatures, regulators and the audit bodies have already published, puts them in one searchable place, and helps you work out which of them matter to you.

It is a finding aid, not the source of record. Where something matters, follow the link and read the original. Every record we hold carries the address it came from, for exactly that reason.

It is not professional advice. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax or regulatory advice, and it is not a substitute for taking any. A briefing that tells you a consultation is open is not telling you what to say in it.

Some of what you read is written by a machine. Summaries, rankings, relevance scores and briefing text are produced with the help of AI models. They can be wrong, and they can be confidently wrong. Check anything you are going to act on.

Our coverage is partial, and always will be. We hold what our sources publish, in the form they publish it. A gap in our data is not evidence that nothing happened. How this is built sets out, register by register, where each one comes from and what it leaves out.

We do not monitor what subscribers do with what they find, and we make no promise to.

Your account

An account belongs to one person at one email address. You may not share your sign-in link, your password or your seat with anybody else — if more people need access, add seats.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself. If you think somebody else has got into your account, tell us and we will shut it down while we sort it out.

You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and if you are opening one for an organisation you must be entitled to agree to these terms on its behalf.

Plans and paying

What each plan includes and what it costs are on the pricing page. We deliberately do not repeat the figures here, so that there is one place to look and no chance of two pages disagreeing.

Payments are taken by Stripe. We never see or hold your card number. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. If a payment fails we will try again and let you know; if it keeps failing we may suspend the subscription.

Founding prices are held. If you subscribed at an early price, that price stays yours for as long as the subscription runs without a break. Let it lapse and restart and you rejoin at whatever the price is then.

We give 30 days’ notice of a price rise, in writing, to the address on your account. If you would rather not pay it, cancel before it takes effect.

Changing your mind, and cancelling

If you are a consumer — buying for yourself rather than for a business — you have 14 days to change your mind, starting the day the contract is made. When you subscribe we ask you to confirm that you want your subscription to start straight away. So if you cancel inside those 14 days, you get your money back less the days you have used: cancel on day 5 of a £25 month and about £21 comes back. Email [email protected] and say you are cancelling; refunds go back the way they came, within 14 days of us hearing from you.

Cancelling at any other time. Cancel whenever you like, from your account or by emailing us. Your access runs to the end of the period you have paid for and then stops. We do not refund part-used periods outside the 14-day right above, except where the law says we must or where we have got something wrong.

If you are buying for a business, the 14-day consumer right does not apply to you, and the paragraph above is the whole of it.

Changes

We will change this site. Registers get added, features get built, things that nobody uses get taken away. Most of that needs no warning.

But if we change these terms, or change the service in a way that materially reduces what you are paying for, we will give you 30 days’ notice in writing. If you do not want to carry on under the new terms, cancel within those 30 days and we will refund the unused part of what you have paid.

The date at the top of this page is the date it last changed.

What you may do with what you find

This is the part people usually want to know, so it is in plain terms.

The underlying public records are not ours to restrict. Most of what we hold is published under the Open Government Licence, the Open Parliament Licence or similar terms, and anyone may reuse it under those licences by going to the source. We do not claim otherwise and we would not try.

What you may do with our version: read it, search it, use it in your own work, quote it, and cite it. Quote a briefing in a board paper, a tender response or a consultation submission as much as you like. A credit is welcome but not required.

What you may not do: republish our registers or briefings wholesale, whether free or for money; extract our data in bulk to build or feed another product; use it to train a machine-learning model; or resell access. The fair use policy sets out where the line falls in practice.

If you want to do any of those things, ask. We would rather license it to you than find out afterwards.

What belongs to whom

Three separate things, and they have three different owners.

The source records belong to whoever published them and are used under their own licences — the Open Government Licence, the Open Parliament Licence, the Open Justice Licence and the audit bodies’ own terms. How this is built names the licence for every register.

The collection is ours. Assembling, checking and presenting hundreds of thousands of records from dozens of sources took substantial investment, and the resulting database is protected by database right in the United Kingdom. That right is asserted. It means you may not extract or reuse a substantial part of the collection, and you may not take small parts repeatedly in a way that adds up to the same thing.

Everything we add is ours too — the relevance scoring, the sector and audience classifications, the summaries, the briefing text, the search index, the site itself and the Seam name and mark. None of it exists in the source records. All rights in it are reserved.

What you write stays yours. The description of your organisation, your saved searches, your questionnaire answers and anything else you type belongs to you. We use it to run the service for you and for nothing else. See the privacy notice for what that means in detail.

And other people’s marks belong to them. Seam connects to services run by other companies, and their names and logos appear on this site only to say which service a button connects to. Slack is a trademark and service mark of Slack Technologies, Inc., registered in the United States and in other countries. Microsoft, Outlook and Teams are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Google, Google Calendar and Gmail are trademarks of Google LLC. Their marks are shown as they were supplied and are never redrawn or recoloured. Seam is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.

Fair use

The fair use policy forms part of these terms. It covers automated access, bulk downloading, working round the preview limits, sharing accounts and what the register of named officials may and may not be used for. It is short and it is worth reading.

Accuracy and availability

We take care over the data and we check it, but we do not warrant that it is complete, current or free of error. Sources change their formats, withdraw documents and republish things under new addresses, and some of that reaches us late or not at all.

We aim to keep the site up and will tell you about planned work where we can, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Parts of it depend on other people’s systems — Cloudflare, Stripe, the source APIs — and when those are down, so are we.

Suspension

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the fair use policy, that is being used to harm the service or another user, or where payment has failed and stayed failed.

Except where the breach is serious or deliberate, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to put it right first. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part.

Our liability

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not let us limit.

If you are a consumer: we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, or for loss connected with using the site for a business. Your legal rights as a consumer are not affected by anything on this page.

If you are a business: we exclude all terms implied by law so far as we are allowed to, and we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of contracts, loss of anticipated savings, or any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability to you, however it arises, is limited to the greater of the fees you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim and £100.

Given what this site is, one point deserves saying plainly: we are not liable for decisions you take on the strength of what you read here. Check the source.

If something goes wrong

Email [email protected] and tell us what has happened. We will acknowledge within five working days and do our best to sort it out. If we cannot, we will say so rather than leave you waiting.

Law and courts

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, that does not mean we have given it up. These terms are between you and us, and nobody else can enforce them.