About & Methodology

When something goes wrong in public services, finding out what happened should lead to things getting better. Too often, it is hard to tell whether it has.

Inquiries, coroners, inspectors, ombudsmen and others identify problems and recommend changes. Their findings can help prevent further deaths and harm. But they are published in different places, earlier warnings are missed, and it can be hard to find out what happened next.

The Accountability Index brings this evidence together in one place. We gather what organisations were told and, where it is published, what they said in response, so it can be searched, compared and followed over time. For public inquiry recommendations we go further, setting the government’s response alongside the published evidence of what has happened since.

We want that information to make a difference. The information can help families, journalists, researchers, campaigners and Parliament ask questions and press for action. Public bodies can use it to spot problems early, learn from others and improve their services.

We do not assume every recommendation is the right answer. But the response to it should be clear: what will change, what will not, and why. People should be able to see what was said in response, check it against what followed, and challenge it.

The index brings together records from 144 official sources across the UK, including inquiries, coroners, inspectors, auditors, ombudsmen, select committees and regulators.

It holds 3,692 public inquiry recommendations, 6,531 coroner reports, 2,175 National Audit Office recommendations and 31,925 select committee conclusions, alongside performance data, inspection ratings, enforcement actions and complaints data.

The Accountability Index is built and maintained by Matt Lewsey. Matt spent over 20 years in the UK Civil Service, most of it working on public inquiries and inquests. His roles included Director of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Director of the Hillsborough Law duty of candour, Secretary to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, Head of Inquiries and Inquests at the Ministry of Defence, and Head of the Cabinet Office’s central inquiries unit. He also led the design and initial setup of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

Matt on LinkedIn

The public index is free to use. Grants support our public-interest work, and paid research and services help fund what we do.

We are grateful for funding from Changing Ideas, a charity that backs people and organisations working for lasting change. With its support, we are building on the public index to help turn earlier warnings and recommendations into action, through research, briefings and tools for families, campaigners and public bodies working to prevent deaths and harm.

We are always working to improve the index. If you spot something that needs correcting, or have an idea for something we should add or change, please get in touch.

The index draws on data from official sources across the UK's oversight landscape, organised into nine categories: recommendations and oversight, health and care, policing, prisons and detention, children and education, ombudsmen and complaints, transport and water, enforcement and transparency, and public spending.

How data is collected

Data is imported from official sources using automated pipelines running on a scheduled basis throughout the day and week. Most sources update daily; others update monthly or when new data is published. Sources include government APIs (Parliament, NHS Digital, CQC, judiciary.uk), structured data downloads (CSV, Excel, PDF), and web scraping where no API is available. Each source has a dedicated importer that normalises the data into a common schema.

Linking findings to organisations

Where records name an organisation (a coroner's PFD report addressed to an NHS trust, for example), we use automated matching to link them to bodies in our database. This matching uses a central resolver with an alias table covering common name variations. Match rates vary by source: typically 80 to 95 per cent for structured data, lower for free-text fields. Where a match cannot be made confidently, the record is left unmatched rather than assigned incorrectly.

View all data sources →

AI helps us work with large amounts of public evidence, bringing together information that would take much longer to find and read by hand.

We use Google Gemini to group records by theme, link them to organisations and summarise findings and responses. Anthropic Claude helps plan research, analyse evidence, write reports and check them against their sources. Claude and OpenAI Codex also help build and maintain the site.

AI-written summaries and assessments are labelled and link to the sources they draw on. AI can miss evidence or misread it, so readers should check the original documents when relying on a finding.

Themes identify recurring issues that appear across multiple data sources. When different oversight bodies independently flag the same concern about the same organisation, the theme system surfaces that pattern.

How themes are generated

Themes are created using a two-step AI process. First, AI analyses recommendations, inspection findings, and coroner reports to identify clusters of related concerns. Second, each record is classified against the discovered themes, creating cross-references between sources that would otherwise sit in separate silos.

Themes are grouped into 274 specific issues across 16 parent categories, covering areas including patient safety, use of force, data protection, safeguarding, and institutional culture. They are generated by AI and should be treated as indicative. False positives are possible, particularly where terminology is ambiguous.

What themes show

Each theme page shows which organisations have been flagged by multiple independent sources for the same issue. A single inspection finding may not be significant. If a coroner, an ombudsman, and a select committee have all raised the same concern about the same body, that convergence is.

View all themes →

The index supports full-text search across all records: inquiry recommendations, coroner reports, inspection findings, ombudsman decisions, NAO reports, and more. Results are ranked by relevance and can be filtered by source type.

The index also supports semantic search, which finds conceptually related records even where the exact search terms do not appear. Searching for "communication failures in emergency care" will surface relevant records from coroner reports, CQC inspections, and PHSO decisions that describe the same issue in different language. This is particularly useful for cross-source pattern finding.

If you spot an error or know of a data source we should include, please get in touch. Factual errors are corrected as a priority. Disagreements about the interpretation of evidence are investigated and updated if additional sources support a change.

Recent government responses and progress updates on inquiry recommendations are listed in What’s changed.

matt@accountabilityindex.uk