Terms of Service

1. Who we are

UKGovscan (ukgovscan.com) is operated by Elenchos Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17458316. Registered office: 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Elenchos Ltd. Contact us at [email protected].

UKGovscan is independent. We are not part of, affiliated with, or endorsed by the UK Government, the UK Parliament, or any of the bodies whose published information appears on the service.

2. Your agreement with us

By using UKGovscan, creating an account or buying a paid plan, you agree to these terms. The rules of use are in section 6, and we may suspend or close an account for breaching them (section 11). Your cancellation and refund rights are in section 5.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data, including what we store on your device. It is not a contractual term.

Some parts of these terms apply differently depending on how you use the service. A consumer is an individual using UKGovscan wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession. A business user is anyone using it wholly or mainly for trade, business, professional or organisational purposes.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights the law says cannot be excluded or restricted.

3. Accounts

• You must be 18 or over to create an account.
• Give us accurate information when you create your account and keep it up to date.
• You are responsible for activity under your account. Tell us at [email protected] as soon as you can if you think someone has gained access to it.

4. Plans and subscriptions

You choose a plan and pay through our payment provider’s hosted checkout. The checkout shows the plan, the price and the billing interval before you pay, and you can go back and change your choice at that point. The contract is formed when your payment is accepted. We do not file a copy of it: these terms remain at ukgovscan.com/terms and you can save or print them. The contract is in English.

• The features and limits in each plan are on the pricing page and are shown again at checkout. Limits such as list sizes and alert quotas are enforced automatically.
• Paid plans are billed in advance and renew automatically at the same interval until you cancel.
• Payment is handled by our payment provider, Stripe.
• If a payment fails, we or Stripe may retry it, and we may restrict paid features while it is outstanding. We will not treat a failed payment as permission to charge you anything other than what is properly due.

5. Renewals, cancellation and refunds

You can turn off automatic renewal at any time in the billing section of your account. There is no cancellation fee. Cancelling stops the next renewal, and your paid features continue until the end of the period you have already paid for.

If you are a consumer

A subscription to UKGovscan is a service. You have the right to cancel this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. The cancellation period will expire after 14 days from the day of the conclusion of the contract. When you subscribe you ask us to start the service immediately, so you keep that right for the full period and pay only a proportionate amount for the time you had access.

To exercise the right to cancel, you must inform us of your decision to cancel this contract by a clear statement. You may email us at [email protected]. Our postal address is on the contact page. To meet the cancellation deadline, it is sufficient for you to send your communication concerning your exercise of the right to cancel before the cancellation period has expired.

Effects of cancellation

If you cancel this contract, we will reimburse to you all payments received from you. We will make the reimbursement without undue delay, and not later than 14 days after the day on which we are informed about your decision to cancel this contract. We will make the reimbursement using the same means of payment as you used for the initial transaction, unless you have expressly agreed otherwise; in any event, you will not incur any fees as a result of the reimbursement.

You have requested that we begin the performance of services during the cancellation period. You shall pay us an amount which is in proportion to what has been provided until you have communicated to us your cancellation of this contract, in comparison with the full coverage of the contract.

A charge you think is wrong

Email [email protected]. If we charged you in error we will refund it.

6. Changes to prices and plans

We may change the price of a subscription for future billing periods. If a change affects an existing subscriber we will give reasonable notice by email before the new price is charged. It never applies to a period you have already paid for, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

We may change plan features or usage limits where it is necessary to:

• improve or develop the service;
• respond to changes in technology, or in the services our providers supply to us;
• maintain the security or integrity of UKGovscan;
• prevent misuse;
• comply with the law or a requirement that applies to us; or
• reflect a material change in the cost of providing a feature.

We will not use this to remove a material part of a paid service without notice. If, during a period you have already paid for, we withdraw or materially reduce a feature that formed a significant part of your plan and do not offer a reasonable alternative, you may end the subscription and we will refund the unused part of that period.

That does not apply to a change we have to make urgently for security, legal or regulatory reasons, though we will take reasonable steps to limit its effect on you.

7. Acceptable use

You are welcome to use UKGovscan for research, journalism, reporting, due diligence and other lawful work, and to publish what you find. This section sets out the uses we do not allow.

Protecting people

You must not use UKGovscan, or information obtained through it, to:

• harass, threaten, stalk, intimidate or endanger anyone, or facilitate unwanted contact;
• publish someone’s personal information in order to expose them to harassment, threats or harm;
• discriminate unlawfully against a person or group;
• build a misleading picture of someone by deliberately presenting information without material context;
• impersonate a person or organisation, or carry out fraud or deception; or
• make allegations about a person or organisation that you know to be false or misleading.

Re-identification

You must not attempt to identify individuals from information we publish only in aggregate, or encourage anyone else to, where doing so would be unlawful or is intended to cause harm. This does not stop legitimate privacy or security research carried out responsibly and within the law. If you find a weakness in how we aggregate or protect information, tell us at [email protected] rather than exploiting it, and do not publish anything that exposes individuals unnecessarily.

Automated access and extraction

You must not use scraping, crawling, bots or other automated methods to extract information from UKGovscan systematically. Where we provide a facility for getting data out, namely the CSV and JSON exports on your plan, use that instead and within its limits. You must not:

• circumvent rate limits, export limits, plan limits or other technical restrictions;
• spread activity across multiple accounts to get around those limits;
• reproduce all or a substantial part of our database;
• build a service that substantially reproduces or substitutes for UKGovscan; or
• place an unreasonable or disruptive load on the service.

These rules concern getting data out of UKGovscan. Nothing here stops you obtaining the same public information directly from the body that published it, or exercising rights you hold under the Open Government Licence, the Open Parliament Licence or another applicable licence.

Accounts and security

You must not:

• share, sell, sublicense or transfer access to your account;
• use someone else’s account or credentials, or try to obtain them;
• create accounts in bulk or by automated means;
• use more than one account to get around a suspension, restriction or plan limit;
• bypass authentication or other access controls;
• interfere with the normal operation of the service, or deliberately degrade it;
• introduce malware or malicious code;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems or data; or
• exploit a security weakness to reach, alter, destroy or disclose information you are not authorised to see.

If you think you have found a security vulnerability, tell us at [email protected]. Give us enough to investigate it, and access no more information than you need to demonstrate the problem. Nothing in these terms permits access to systems or information you are not otherwise authorised to reach.

Publishing and citing us

You may use UKGovscan as a source for research, journalism, reporting and analysis, quote individual records and figures, and publish your findings. You must not:

• describe UKGovscan as an official government or parliamentary service;
• suggest that Elenchos Ltd, the UK Government, Parliament or a data publisher endorses you or your conclusions when they do not; or
• present information in a way that materially misrepresents what the underlying record says.

How we enforce this

Where we reasonably believe this section has been breached, we may rate-limit access, ask you to stop, suspend an account, or end access under section 11. Which of those we do depends on how serious the problem is.

We would not normally close an account over a minor or accidental breach without first giving you a reasonable chance to put it right. Making a good-faith mistake is not by itself a breach. We may act immediately where it is necessary to deal with fraud, a security threat, serious abuse, a risk of harm, or unlawful activity. Where it is appropriate and lawful, we may keep information about suspected misuse and give it to law enforcement or a regulator.

To report misuse of the service or of its data, email [email protected] with enough detail for us to look into it.

8. Accuracy

UKGovscan brings together information published by third parties: government departments, public bodies, regulators and official registers.

We take reasonable care in operating the service and processing what we receive. Public datasets nonetheless contain errors, omissions and delays, sources are corrected after we have collected them, and the automated processes we use to standardise, connect and match records can produce an incorrect match. So we do not promise that every record is complete, current or free from error.

Every record links to its source where one is available. If the accuracy of a record matters to what you are doing, and particularly before you publish or take an important decision, check it against that source. If you think something here is wrong, tell us through the feedback page.

The appearance of a person, organisation, contract, payment, donation or interest on UKGovscan does not imply wrongdoing. Nothing on the service is legal, financial, investment or other professional advice.

This section does not reduce our obligation to provide the service with reasonable care and skill.

9. Intellectual property

Our sources and their attribution are on the Data sources page, and your use of their material remains subject to whatever licence they publish it under.

Elenchos Ltd owns, or is licensed to use, the intellectual property in UKGovscan itself: its software, design, branding, original text and analysis, and, so far as the law protects it, the selection, arrangement, compilation, matching and cross-referencing of the information in our database.

Subject to these terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use UKGovscan for lawful research and analysis, and to publish what you find.

Without our permission, you must not:

• resell our exports as a standalone data product;
• remove our branding or attribution in a way that suggests our material is yours.

Nothing in these terms gives us ownership of facts, or of public-source material we do not otherwise own, and nothing in this section restricts a right you have independently under the law or under an applicable open licence.

10. Availability

No online service can be guaranteed to run without interruption. Access may be interrupted by maintenance, security incidents, software faults, infrastructure failures, changes made by our suppliers, or problems affecting the public data sources the service relies on.

We may restrict or suspend all or part of the service where it is necessary for maintenance, security, legal compliance, or to protect UKGovscan and its users.

Where you deal directly with a third party we rely on, such as Stripe or Telegram, its own terms also govern its relationship with you.

If we permanently discontinue UKGovscan, we will give paid subscribers reasonable notice where we can and refund the unused part of any prepaid period.

11. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service and delete your account at any time from your account settings.

We may restrict, suspend or close an account where it is necessary because:

• you have seriously or repeatedly breached these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• payment properly due is outstanding;
• we reasonably believe the account is compromised or is being used fraudulently;
• your use creates a material security, legal or operational risk;
• the law, a court or a competent authority requires it; or
• it is necessary to protect UKGovscan, another user, or a person whose information appears in the database.

Where the circumstances allow, we will tell you the reason and give you a reasonable chance to put the problem right before we close an account permanently. We may act immediately where the matter is urgent or serious, involves security or suspected fraud, or where notice would be unlawful or would defeat the purpose of acting.

If we end a paid subscription because of your serious breach, no refund is due for the rest of the period. If we end it for reasons unrelated to your conduct, we will refund the unused part.

12. Our responsibility to consumers

This section applies if you are a consumer.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and your statutory rights as a consumer, including the right to a service carried out with reasonable care and skill.

We are responsible for losses you suffer that are a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. A loss is foreseeable if, at the time the contract was made, it was obvious that it would happen, or if both you and we knew it might.

We are not responsible for losses that were not foreseeable in that sense, or for losses caused by something we are not legally responsible for.

UKGovscan is supplied to consumers for private use. We are not responsible under this section for business losses, such as lost profits, revenue, business or commercial opportunity.

13. Our responsibility to business users

This section applies if you are a business user.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable to a business user for:

• loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, anticipated savings or commercial opportunity;
• loss of goodwill or reputation;
• indirect or consequential loss; or
• loss arising from a decision to publish, transact or otherwise act without checking material information against the underlying source, where it was reasonable to do so.

Subject to the liabilities above that cannot lawfully be limited, our total liability to a business user in connection with the service in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of £100 and the total subscription fees paid or payable by that business user in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

14. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms where it is necessary to:

• reflect changes to UKGovscan or the way we provide it;
• comply with a change in the law or regulation;
• respond to a security problem or to misuse;
• clarify an existing provision; or
• make a reasonable change to our commercial arrangements.

The current version and its effective date are always at ukgovscan.com/terms. A change never alters rights or obligations that have already arisen. Where a material change affects account holders we will give reasonable notice by email before it takes effect, and a paid subscriber materially disadvantaged by it may cancel before it does, and we will refund the unused part of a prepaid period.

We may make an urgent change without advance notice where security, the law or a regulator requires it, and will tell affected users as soon as we reasonably can.

15. General

These terms, with the policies stated to form part of them, are the agreement between you and us about the service. Nothing in this section excludes liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or rights that the law treats as binding. If part of these terms is unlawful or unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

You may not transfer your subscription or your rights under these terms to anyone else without our agreement, unless the law gives you that right. We may transfer ours as part of a restructuring, financing, merger, acquisition or sale of the service or of Elenchos Ltd; if you are a consumer, we will not do so in a way that reduces your contractual or statutory rights.

No one other than you and Elenchos Ltd may enforce these terms, except where the law provides otherwise.

16. Governing law and disputes

Consumers

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer living elsewhere, that choice does not deprive you of the mandatory protections of the law where you live, and you may bring proceedings in any court that has jurisdiction under the law that applies to you.

Business users

These terms, and any non-contractual dispute or claim arising out of them, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.