GOV.UK provides many links to local services run by local government in the UK (for example pay council tax. You can read more about how the links to these services are managed on the Government Digital Service blog.

This app imports the daily feed of URLs (there are somewhere in the region of 94 thousand of them) and runs them through a series of tests, including:

• is the URL working (e.g. is it a 404)?
• is the URL reporting that it works, but is actually a 404? (some council websites don't use real 404s)?
• is the website configured to return 404s? (this test is really crude, but useful)

The app also keeps a record of the changes to the URLs, and produces lists of URLs that have problems.

I'll add more documentation to explain how to get this app up and running soon.