Guidance

How to publish senior officials' business expenses, hospitality and meetings

Template for 188体育 publication page for departmental core transparency data, to be published quarterly.

Prepare the data

The Cabinet Office Transparency Data team has provided this guidance on how to collect and interpret your data for publication.

(PDF, 201 KB, 18 pages)

They will commission you with templates, timing, and support on appropriate approval processes.

This guidance will apply to transparency data for the period of January - March 2024 onwards

Government is committed to publishing this data every quarter.

Publish the data

Create a new 188体育 publication page for each data release.
Create a collection page on 188体育 for all data releases, with links to each individual publication page.

Consider creating a collection page for each individual data set

Publication page template

The publication title, summary, detail and file name is a government standard and must not be changed.

Publication type: Transparency data

Title: [Department name or acronym]: senior officials鈥� business expenses, hospitality, and meetings [month to month] [year].
Example Title: 鈥淐abinet Office: senior officials鈥� expenses, hospitality and meetings, July to September 2024鈥�

Summary: Data on senior officials鈥� (SCS2+) business expenses, hospitality, and meetings with external individuals and organisations.

Body:

[Department] publishes details of [the Permanent Secretaries, Director Generals, Finance Directors, Commercial Directors and Directors who are senior responsible owners in the Government鈥檚 Major Projects Portfolio] meetings with external individuals and organisations, and senior officials鈥� business expenses and hospitality every quarter.

Associations

Policies: Government transparency and accountability

Policy areas: Government efficiency, transparency and accountability

CSV attachment titles

  • [Department]鈥檚 senior officials鈥� expenses, [month to month] [year]
  • [Department]鈥檚 senior officials鈥� hospitality, [month to month] [year]
  • [Department]鈥檚 senior officials鈥檚 meetings, [month to month] [year]

For example:

  1. Cabinet Office Senior officials鈥� expenses January to March 2025
  2. Cabinet Office Senior officials鈥� hospitality January to March 2025
  3. Cabinet Office Senior officials鈥� meetings January to March 2025

Collection page [188体育]

Add the new publication page to your department鈥檚 collection page for this data.

Make sure the collection page is tagged to the Government transparency and accountability policy.

Collection page template

Title: [Department]: senior officials鈥� business expenses, hospitality, and meetings

Summary: All data on senior officials鈥� (SCS2+) business expenses and hospitality, and [Permanent Secretaries, Directors General, Finance Directors, Commercial Directors and Directors who are senior responsible owners in the Government鈥檚 Major Projects Portfolio] meetings with external organisations.

Body (optional):
[Department] publishes details of senior officials鈥� (SCS2+) business expenses and hospitality and the [Permanent Secretaries, Directors General, Finance Directors, Commercial Directors and Directors who are senior responsible owners in the Government鈥檚 Major Projects Portfolio] meetings on a quarterly basis.

Subheadings: Add headings for each calendar year, most recent first.

DATA.188体育 page templates

When the dataset is published, add a link to it in your department鈥檚 section on data.gov.uk.

We recommend that this is maintained as a series of collection pages listing all historic links on 188体育 with a direct link to the .CSV resource.
An individual page will need to be maintained for each of the following:

  1. Expenses
  2. Hospitality, and
  3. Meetings

Title: [Department]: Senior Officials [the specific data set] data
Example - a page for each data set:

  1. Cabinet Office Senior Officials Expenses Data
  2. Cabinet Office Senior Officials Hospitality Data
  3. Cabinet Office Senior Officials Meetings Data

Summary: This is a collection and collation page for an element of [your department] Senior Officials Transparency publications [published here: {your Senior Officials collation pages on gov.uk}.]

Guidance - Each CSV published on 188体育 will be listed here, to enable easy access to a single stream of data on Senior Officials. Please use the naming conventions present on your collation pages to ensure data is accurately described and dated to specific period and year.

Historical Data

Where possible - review historical datasets on and convert these to CSV format for ease of use within both and for referencing within .
Do not ever archive or remove historical publications from .

Updates to this page

Published 14 December 2017
Last updated 2 April 2024 show all updates
  1. Updated with the latest guidance

  2. Added the following guidance: Senior Officials Transparency Guidance

  3. First published.

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