About & Methodology

Why this exists

Public inquiries investigate events that have caused serious harm and ask what needs to change. Their work should help prevent the same failures from happening again. But it can be hard to follow an inquiry, find its evidence, or see what happened after it reported.

UK Inquiry Tracker brings that information together. It helps people follow inquiries while they are running and, after they report, compare their recommendations with the government’s response and the published evidence of what has happened since.

The information can help families, journalists, researchers, campaigners and Parliament ask questions and press for action. Public bodies can use it to learn from earlier inquiries and improve their services. Inquiry teams can use it to learn how other inquiries have organised their work and gathered evidence, and what they recommended.

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 check that response against what followed and challenge it.

What the tracker covers

The tracker brings together 116 UK public inquiries, with 3,692 recommendations recorded so far. It covers ongoing, completed and historic inquiries.

• While an inquiry is running: information about its purpose, people and timetable, with hearings, witnesses and published documents where available.
• After an inquiry reports: copies of its reports where available, its recommendations, the government’s response, and published evidence of progress.
• Across inquiries: information about their duration and costs, and themes that help readers explore related concerns.

Coverage varies. Some inquiries have detailed records; others have only basic information. Older inquiries often have fewer documents available, and some inquiries make no recommendations.

Who we are

UK Inquiry Tracker 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

How we are funded

The public tracker 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 Accountability 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.

The tracker is independent of the UK government, political parties and public inquiries. It is not an official government resource.

The Accountability Index

UK Inquiry Tracker focuses on public inquiries. Our wider project, the Accountability Index, brings inquiry recommendations together with findings from coroners, inspectors, auditors, ombudsmen, select committees and regulators.

It helps people see where earlier warnings have been raised across public services and find out what organisations said in response. Coroners’ Prevention of Future Deaths reports and responses are available there.

How we track recommendations

We record recommendations using the original wording from inquiry reports. We identify the responsible organisations from the report or the government’s response. Where no department is named, a recommendation may be recorded against “UK Government”.

We set the government’s stated response alongside published evidence of what happened next. These answer different questions: accepting a recommendation does not mean it has been carried out.

Government response: what the government said it would do

• Accepted The government accepted the recommendation.
• Accepted in part Accepted in principle, or partly accepted.
• Accepted (fully or in part) The department's own statement groups the recommendation with others as accepted or partly accepted, without saying which.
• Not accepted The government rejected the recommendation. Its stated reason is shown with the response.
• Noted The response discusses the recommendation but neither accepts nor rejects it.
• Under consideration The government has said it is still considering its response.
• No response yet No government response to the recommendation is on the record yet.

Delivery: what the body the recommendation is addressed to says it has done

Delivery labels always report a statement by the body the recommendation is addressed to, with its date and source. They are that body's own account, not this site's judgement.

• Delivered, Partly delivered, In progress: what the addressee says, in its own words.
• No delivery statement found: no statement about delivery from the addressee has been found in the sources searched. The sources searched are the government's published responses and progress reports, GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk, Hansard (statements, written answers and debates) and official recommendation dashboards where they exist. Each inquiry's pages give the date its record was last checked. Not finding a statement does not show that nothing has been done.

What happened next

Evidence summaries and progress timelines bring together published updates, with links or references to their sources. These include government response documents, policy announcements, legislation, parliamentary debates and scrutiny, and inspection findings.

A public body saying it has made a change is not proof that the change has worked. A lack of published evidence does not prove that nothing has been done.

How we use AI

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 summarise published evidence and group records by theme. 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 summaries of evidence about recommendations draw on official and regulatory sources, including government response documents, GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk and Hansard.

AI-written summaries and assessments are labelled and link to the sources they draw on. AI can miss evidence, confuse related recommendations or misread a source. These outputs have not all been checked by a person, so readers should check the original documents when relying on a finding.

Keeping information up to date

Inquiry pages show a “last verified” date where recorded. This tells you when the inquiry’s data was last checked against official sources. Individual records and updates may have different dates.

We prioritise inquiries with active follow-up programmes. Older inquiries with fewer changes may be checked less often, and updates can lag behind official announcements.

Help us improve

We are always working to improve the tracker. If you spot something that needs correcting, or have an idea for something we should add or change, please get in touch. You can also use “Submit a Correction” on a recommendation page.

Please include a link to the record and, if possible, a source that helps explain the correction. We prioritise errors according to their seriousness and review additional evidence when a finding is challenged.

The What’s changed lists recent government responses and progress updates recorded against inquiry recommendations.