£83 Billion In Arms: Track How The UK Fuels Global Conflict And Repression HERE

The UK Export Data Browser is a searchable, interactive database of every UK arms export licence granted since 2008 – that’s £83bn worth of approved exports. You can filter by country, type of weapon, company, time period, and whether the licence was standard or unlimited.

Why it exists, and why that matters for you:

The government buries this data in slow, hard-to-download PDF reports. CAAT took that raw data and rebuilt it as something any journalist, activist, lawyer, or member of the public can explore in seconds.

Explore This Platform To:

• See what role the UK has played in the catastrophic strikes across Lebanon, Iran, and Palestine
• Look up £12bn in arms to Saudi Arabia since the Yemen bombing started in 2015
• See exports to the UK’s own government list of “countries of concern” -hypocrisy amounting to £9.8bn
• With 703 tear gas licences worldwide - trace the tools of repression, see where the UK exports “crowd control” ammunition, riot shields, and other anti-protest equipment to governments that punish protest.
• The raw data is open on GitHub for journalists and researchers to reuse
• Declining transparency: Since 2023, an increasing proportion of export licence data goes through a new government online system called LITE, for which much less detail is available, as it is not in the government’s public online database. We’ve found a way to incorporate this data into the browser to highlight the transparency gaps.

Building and maintaining this tool takes significant technical resource and investigative effort – from FOI requests to quarterly updates, from data engineering to research and analysis It underpins journalism, legal challenges, and parliamentary scrutiny.

It only exists because supporters like you make it possible.

And with your help, we can do more of it…and help bring an end to the arms trade.

In Solidarity,

Hassan

P.S. Stay tuned for a walkthrough from our wonderful Research Coordinator, Sam, showing us how to get the most out of the tool!