The PHE Gateway process covers publications such as guidance, statutory documents and corporate reports. For the full list of materials, see materials requiring gateway clearance.
All publications must meet PHE's editorial style. It's important to use the pre-formatted style panel in the Microsoft Word standard document template to format your content.
All content and services must be as accessible and usable as possible. Documents published on GOV.UK or other public sector websites must meet accessibility standards.
We do not publish PowerPoint, Excel and Word files on GOV.UK as these are closed formats that require a user to purchase Microsoft software. The government is committed to publishing documents using open formats:
If a document is designed to be edited, you must publish it as:
- .odp (OpenDocument Presentation) for presentation slides
- .odt (OpenDocument Text) for text documents
- .ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) for spreadsheets
However, if the content is only designed to be viewed, it must be available in one of the following formats:
- HTML (the language web pages are built with)
- PDF (formatted to be accessible, meeting the PDF/A standard and using the approved PHE document template)
It may be possible to publish on other platforms such as Knowledge Hub (KHub). Contact the Gateway Publishing service desk for more information.
Exceptions to the publishing process
The exceptions to our usual publishing process include:
- materials destined for internal staff communications - contact internalcomms@phe.gov.uk
- letters which have a separate gateway process - contact sam.parry@phe.gov.uk
- blogs - contact sanjay.tanday@phe.gov.uk
- social media posts - contact philippa.simons@phe.gov.uk
- reports written for non-PHE channels, such as scientific journals - see the research support and governance office guidance on non-PHE publishing
- content for GovDelivery - contact sam.parry@phe.gov.uk
- videos which follow the mandatory video gateway process - contact video@phe.gov.uk