How verification works
Every legal claim on this site renders from one tested data file — the evidence register. This page explains what the register promises, and what it does not.
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The claim and the passage are different things
The claim at the top of an evidence card is an authored restatement, published exactly as recorded in the evidence register. The supporting passage inside the card's disclosure is quoted verbatim from the identified source, with its pinpoint citation. The two are kept visibly distinct so a sceptical reader can inspect exactly why the site says what it says.
The automated check and the human check are different promises
An automated check fails the build if a quotation no longer matches the pinned source extract for this version of the site. That is an internal-integrity promise: the page cannot drift from the register, and the register cannot drift from the vendored extracts it cites. It is what the terse line inside every card's disclosure — "Pinned extract matched at build" — reports.
Whether the claim is true against the living source is a separate, human promise. Each verified fact records who checked it against the primary source and on what date — for example, "Verified · JK · 10 Jul 2026" — and that date is the second half of the card's method line: "External source checked 10 July 2026". Only a named person sets a fact to verified, after reading the laid instrument. Nothing flips that flag automatically.
Verification does not last forever
A verification is a dated event, not a permanent state. Every verified fact carries a recheck discipline: an ordinary review interval, and — for claims verified against an instrument that is laid but not yet in force — the day that instrument commences, whichever comes first. A verification made against laid text stops being current the moment the text becomes operative law.
When a recheck falls due, the claim renders a dated "Recheck overdue" signal beside its verification state, and the build pipeline warns on every run until a named person has rechecked the source. The overdue signal never changes the verified flag itself — it reports decay; it does not repair it.
The corrections policy
Anything this site got wrong lands on the public corrections ledger, dated, with the original wording kept struck-through — never deleted — the corrected wording, the reason, and whether the conclusion changed. A correction is not housekeeping: every claim it touches carries a red "Corrected" strip wherever that claim renders, permanently. The ledger started before the site launched, because an error record that starts clean at launch isn't one.
Recorded negative searches
Where the site reports that an instrument has not been located, that is a documented search by a stated method at a stated date — never a claim that the instrument does not exist. These facts render as "No instrument located (as of a stated date)" and are recorded, not verifiable: there is no source passage to pin. The search is re-run on a weekly watch, and the date shown moves only when the search actually ran.
A stated convention is not a claim that the law is settled
Some legal questions this site answers are not, on the evidence available, conclusively settled — only more or less well supported. The clearest example is which nation's bank-holiday calendar the working-day definition uses where a request spans England/Wales and Scotland: the deadline calculator shows both calendars' computations side by side for that case and identifies the earlier date as the safer one to act on. That is a stated convention for this site's own computations, not a claim that the law has settled on it — the legal-review flag on that question stays in place, at medium confidence, until a court, the Central Arbitration Committee or amending legislation actually resolves it.
The same discipline applies wherever this site has to choose a practical answer to a genuinely open question: state the convention plainly, act on it consistently, and never let a convention adopted for this site's own purposes quietly become an unflagged assertion about what the law requires.
Synthetic data, declared
Every union, employer, person, workplace and story date in this site's walkthroughs is invented, and every scenario page says so before its story starts. Invented names are checked against real organisations to avoid collisions — one candidate employer name was discarded for exactly that reason. No real organisation is named, scored or compared anywhere.
Licence and reuse
Quote this site with attribution to the publisher named in the footer. Formal licence terms are one of the decisions recorded for the project's September review — until they are published here, ask before reproducing whole pages.