I'm slightly confused by the website tagline

[rossmounce]

The Public Bodies tagline is "A URL for every part of government"

yet very non-government entities pop-up on the UK list e.g. ASDA

It would be less catchy a tagline but perhaps, "A URL for every FoI-able public sector organisation" might be more accurate, less confusing?

[rufuspollock]

I'd go the other way. We should remove bodies that are not public bodies :-)

[rossmounce]

Yes, that is another good solution. Depends what you want the site to be I guess.

either "URL's for every part of gov" OR "URL's for every FoI-able public sector organisation"

but it seems it can't be both

[rufuspollock]

It's definitely the former. I'm doing a delete now on the asda example - if you find more let us know (you can just delete the line in the relevant spreadsheet and do a pull request :-) ).

[davidread]

There are plenty of bodies which are in a grey area that I think are well worth having in this list. e.g. Energy Saving Trust http://publicbodies.org/gb/energy-saving-trust.html was set-up by government, 90% funded by them, is apparently not FOIable and is technically a private company. I guess WDTK include companies like this because knowing that this quasi-government organisation is not FOI-able is useful information. For the same reason I think all shades of quangos should be included in this list. It would be good to define what properties of an organisation mean it should be on this list, e.g. starting with criteria of: >50% public funding OR does business on behalf of government, specifically to include what UK calls NDPBs, Trading Funds. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_fund

A few examples of organisations in the grey area which I think we should include:

• High Speed Two Ltd - a company limited by guarantee established and funded by the UK government. Yes include.
• Marine Environmental Data & Information Network - appears to be funded mostly by UK government bodies.
• Hillsborough Independent Panel - run and funded by UK gov.

And there are some bodies on data.gov.uk that I don't expect would be included, and seem outside that definition e.g.:

• Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy - a professional institute for accountants working in the public services. Funded by civil servants themselves?
• Spike Cavell Ltd - makes most of its money supplying government, but not 'funded' by government