govuk-mcp: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

govuk-mcp CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from paulieb89/govuk-mcp. It costs 1,083 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Project instructions for govuk-mcp, an MCP server that provides read-only access to UK government information from GOV.UK. It includes search, page, organisation, postcode, and resource operations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Searching GOV.UK content, inspecting pages and sections, looking up government organisations, listing organisations, and resolving UK postcodes to local administrative information.
Why use it?
It lets an AI assistant find and inspect government content through defined tools without needing separate web-scraping code or authentication for the listed public APIs.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: the file is CLAUDE.md. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

This is paulieb89/govuk-mcp's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on govuk-mcp itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything govuk-mcp configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to paulieb89/govuk-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paulieb89/govuk-mcp/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paulieb89/govuk-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

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Per session 1,083 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,083 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.01083 $0.01083
Opus 5 $0.00541 $0.00541
Sonnet 5 $0.00217 $0.00217
Haiku 4.5 $0.00108 $0.00108

Measured 10d ago against content hash 8864dbfe2f51, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

govuk-mcp CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Project

govuk-mcp is an MCP server exposing UK government data through 7 read-only tools and 6 resource templates. All external APIs are public and require no authentication.

Tools

Tool What it does
govuk_search Full-text search across GOV.UK's 700k+ content items
govuk_grep_content Regex/substring search within a specific GOV.UK page body
govuk_get_content Page metadata + navigable section index by base_path
govuk_get_section Body HTML for a single named section (anchor) of a page
govuk_get_organisation Full organisation profile by slug
govuk_list_organisations Paginated list of all UK government organisations
govuk_lookup_postcode Resolve a UK postcode to local authority, region, constituency

govuk_get_content, govuk_get_section, and govuk_get_organisation are named companion tools (lesson 35 pattern) — they serve tool-only clients (ChatGPT, Ledgerhall proxy) with clean dict/Pydantic returns. Protocol-aware clients (Claude, Cursor) can use the equivalent govuk:// resources directly.

Resources (govuk:// URI templates)

For protocol-aware clients. Same underlying data as the companion tools, but URI-addressed and bounded.

URI template Returns
govuk://content/{base_path*}/header Page metadata (title, doc type, dates)
govuk://content/{base_path*}/index Section anchor:heading list
govuk://content/{base_path*}/section/{anchor} Bounded HTML for one section
govuk://content/{base_path*}/details/{field} Schema-specific details field (body, attachments, etc.)
govuk://content/{base_path*}/links/{rel} Related content by link type
govuk://organisation/{slug} Organisation profile

Commands

uv sync --group dev   # Install dependencies including dev/test tools
uv run govuk-mcp      # Run server on http://localhost:8000/mcp
fly deploy            # Deploy to Fly.io (https://govuk-mcp.fly.dev/mcp)

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 96 lines · 1,083 tokens per session scan A 8864dbfe2f51

Subscribe to this mod's changes

govuk-mcp CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository paulieb89/govuk-mcp (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,083 tokens to every session, about $0.0054 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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