UK Data Service
The UK Data Service is a national resource, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, that holds a large collection of social science data. It brings together major UK surveys, census data, longitudinal studies, and international datasets used across research and teaching.
Access is tiered. Some data is open, but a lot of it sits behind registration or an institutional login, and the more sensitive datasets require an approved project and secure environment. That makes it richer than a typical open portal but slower to get started with, so budget time for the access process.
For RAG, it is most valuable when your system needs authoritative UK social, economic, or demographic data with clear provenance. Start at the catalogue, check the access level on each dataset, and register early if you find something you want to use.
Related sources
Awesome Legal Data
A community-maintained list of legal datasets, tools, and resources for legal text processing across jurisdictions, including court records, statutes, contracts, and legal NLP benchmarks. A useful map for anyone building a legal RAG system.
Awesome Public Datasets
A community-curated list of high-quality open datasets on GitHub, organised by topic: agriculture, biology, climate, economics, education, finance, government, healthcare, and more. A good starting point when you need RAG-ready data for a specific domain and do not yet know where to look.
DataKind UK Open Data Sets
A curated list of UK-focused open datasets from DataKind UK, covering government, health, crime, housing, and social data. A quick way into British public data when you are building a RAG system with a UK focus.
NLP Datasets
An alphabetical list of free and public domain text datasets for natural language processing, covering corpora, dialogue, sentiment, and summarisation. Handy when you want text-heavy data to build or evaluate a RAG system.