Editorial standards

Sourcing

Reporting is built on primary sources: roll-call records, committee documents, the Official Journal, the transparency and lobby registers, agendas, and the acts themselves. Where a claim rests on a document, the document is linked. A reader who wants to check us should not have to take our word for the existence of the evidence.

Where a document is not public, we say so — and we say what we asked for, and who refused it.

Naming positions

Institutions do not vote; people do. Where a position is on the public record, the person or delegation that took it is named. Where a vote was not recorded by name, we say that too, rather than implying a precision the record does not carry.

Independence

No political party, institution, campaign or advertiser has any input into what we cover, when we publish, or how a story is written. Advertising is sold programmatically, and no advertiser receives advance sight of coverage. Nobody buys their way out of a story.

Staff political activity that could reasonably be read as a conflict is disclosed on the stories it touches.

Corrections

Errors get a dated correction on the article that carried them, saying what was wrong and what is right. We do not quietly edit a published claim and leave the page looking as though it always said the new thing: a silent edit spends exactly the trust a correction is meant to protect. The route for reporting one is here.

Artificial intelligence

AI tools may be used for research support, translation drafts and transcription. They are not used to generate published copy, and no output is published without a person verifying it against the primary source. Responsibility for every published sentence is human.

Advertising and editorial

Advertising is labelled and visually separated from editorial content. We do not publish paid content styled to read as reporting. Pages that exist only to carry advertising — thin aggregation, listicles assembled for traffic — are not part of the plan.