Data licensing
What The Governance Register holds, what is open, and how to license the linked graph or get API access.
The distinctive asset: the linked graph
Every register below is public. What we add is resolution: the same person found across companies, charities, schools, public bodies, the NHS and councils, with dated board overlaps and the shortest evidenced path between any two people or organisations.
Overlaps are confirmed matches only (dated, with an overlap start/end where known) - never inferred from name similarity alone.
UK holdings, live counts
Every figure above is queried live from the underlying database at page render - see the full query list at /data-licensing/counts.
Other editions
The UK edition is the deep one. Other jurisdictions are real, sourced and dated, but thinner - honestly so:
| Edition | Organisations | People |
|---|---|---|
| Ireland (charities + state boards) | 14,340 | 60,694 |
| United States (nonprofit boards, Form 990) | 1,983,563 | 4,979,148 |
| Canada (incl. federal) | 135,150 | 4,235,059 |
| Australia | 66,013 | 921 |
| New Zealand | 52,324 | 584,458 |
| Scotland (OSCR) | 25,048 | 115,494 |
| Northern Ireland | 8,358 | n/a |
Some editions (Northern Ireland, Scotland's separate appointments file, Australia, New Zealand) currently hold organisation and person records without full board-appointment coverage; treat their people counts as thinner than the UK's dated appointment history.
Provenance and licensing
Sources are official public registers, reproduced as held: the Charity Commission and Companies House (Open Government Licence v3.0), the DfE governance register (OGL), the Cabinet Office public appointments data (OGL), NHS ODS (OGL), Democracy Club council and councillor data (CC BY), and 360Giving grants data (CC BY, per-publisher attribution).
Attribution to the original register is required wherever you use a record; that is a condition of the underlying licences and applies whether or not you use our API. You do not need to re-license the underlying open data from us to use it under its own licence.
What we license is the linked dataset: the identity resolution, the board-overlap and ownership graph, the path-finding, and API access to query it. That compiled work carries our own copyright and database right.
What we will not license
- Anything that identifies a private individual beyond what the public register record itself shows
- Bulk personal data intended for re-identification, profiling or marketing
- Any data from user accounts, claims, messages, invitations or saved lists - that is never in scope, regardless of request
API access
Read-only, key-based, JSON. Base URL /api/v1/. Full documentation, endpoints and examples: /data-licensing/api.
Default limits are modest (1,000 records/day, 30 requests/minute) and are set per key when a request is approved.
Request access
Tell us who you are and what you want to do with it. Requests are reviewed by a person; there is no self-serve key issuance.