Every item is written to the standard set out below.

Grade A

Primary, public record, official, or open licence. Stated flat and cited to the document. A Grade A document may support a fact on its own.

Grade B

Free sources read for the index and the link only, used for salience and for verification. Grade B is never the sole support for a fact, and supports a claim only alongside a Grade A source.

Grade C

One free archive of news pages, handled with care. Grade C is an extraction signal only: never cited, never stored as text, and never the sole support for anything.

Every register declares its grade and its licence, and each one is published in the source register. A register with no licence does not load at all, and the pipeline refuses to write a fact from a register whose grade this policy does not permit.

A fact is written only with a Grade A document, or with two independent outlets plus one Grade A or public-domain source.

Where that floor is not met the item still publishes, and the claim carries the label "reported by X, not independently confirmed", where X is the named outlet.

Two outlets are independent when they share no publisher group, no byline and no near-duplicate hash from the wire-copy detector. Two titles in one group count as one outlet.

A claim resting on two same-group titles with no Grade A source does not meet the floor. It is refused as a corroborated fact and rendered with the not-confirmed label instead.

A number comes from the statistics agency, never from an article, and it names its source in the same sentence or in the citation beside it. A numeric claim citing only an outlet is rejected at write time, and the item is not stored.

A statement by a government or by an army in an armed conflict is always attributed, whatever its grade, and is never given flat. A sentence naming a party to a conflict with no attribution clause is refused by the linter, and the item is not written.

Each label is computed by a function from the corroboration grade, the number of sources, their independence and the presence of an origin document. A model never picks one. The function runs again before storage, so an item cannot be delivered carrying a label its evidence does not support.

The voice is flat-calm and plain-spoken, and it is held by a deterministic linter rather than by a style guide. The linter reads every rendered surface: item bodies, notification text, email subject lines, widget strings, audio scripts, cards, the human-readable fields of the API, place pages, and this marketing site. A hit fails the build and stops delivery at runtime.

• Intensity verbs, where a plain verb states what happened.
• Nouns that state a mood rather than a fact, where the official term for the thing is available.
• Urgency markers, which exist to make a reader open something.
• Unattributed authority, where a person or a document has a name that can be given instead.
• Editorialising adjectives. An adjective is permitted only from an allow-list of factual qualifiers: numeric, dimensional, geographic, legal, official titles, and material descriptions taken word for word from a cited document.
• Speculation frames, which describe a future no document supports.
• Punctuation and glyphs that raise the voice: the exclamation mark, the em dash, emoji, and words in capitals over three characters.
• Interrogative sentences in an item body or in the Line.

One construction is mandatory. Every item carries a line saying what it means for you: a column that cannot be null, at most twenty-five words, second person, present tense, and it may not restate the first sentence. An item without one fails schema validation and is never written, queued or delivered.

A private individual is named only where a Grade A document names them, and the item states which document. A public office-holder is named in relation to their official function. A private individual is never named from a Grade B source, and never from Grade C at all.

The rule is enforced by a linter that reads the type of the entity together with the grade of the citation. An item that does not meet it is refused before it is stored, and it reaches no channel.

• School ratings.
• Crime.
• Court items.
• Any item naming a private individual.
• A licensing decision naming a person.
• Any item carrying the not-confirmed label.

One editor for each region works this queue. An item in one of these categories cannot publish on any channel without an approval row, and the refusal sits at the delivery boundary rather than in the interface, so an unapproved item is absent from the page, the email, the feed and the API alike.

Crime is given as police.uk statistics for an area, never as an allegation about a person or an address, and no item names a suspect.

Court reporting comes from the official list or from the judgment, contemporaneously, in the fair and accurate framing the law provides for. Active proceedings receive no comment, no context and no backstory beyond the charge as listed, because of contempt of court.

A school rating states the Ofsted judgement with its date and its inspection reference and never characterises it. Rated Requires Improvement at its inspection of 14 March 2026 is publishable. An adjective about the school is not.

An item version is immutable once it has been delivered. A correction is an item in its own right, and it travels every channel the original travelled, including a recap page someone has already shared and a licensee's feed.

Every correction is entered in the corrections log, which is public and permanent, and which exists before there is anything in it.