Rights and Limits

Changelog

Police powers change often — the Public Order Act 2023 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 both rewrote parts of this area within the last few years. Rights advice that has quietly gone stale is harmful advice, so every change here is dated.

• 2026-08-25

  Site created. First nine England & Wales pages published (noindex).

  Covers when you must answer, the caution and adverse inference, stop and search, being stopped while driving, giving your name, rights in custody, custody time limits, Schedule 7 port examinations, and phone passwords. 18 authorities, all quoted verbatim from legislation.gov.uk and machine-verified.

• 2026-08-30

  Scotland stop-and-search powers, a Scotland stop-and-search data layer, and SEO launch plumbing.

  Added the three Scotland-specific powers behind most real Scottish searches (Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 s.66, Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 s.60, Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act 1995 s.50), and a Police Scotland figures layer alongside the existing England & Wales one. Also: a single route enumeration feeding both the sitemap and the static build so the two cannot drift, canonicals, and Article/BreadcrumbList structured data.

• 2026-08-31

  Scotland "at the door" and "after arrest", 9 pages, 63 authorities.

  Scotland had none of this content while England & Wales had eleven pages between the two sections. Researched from Scots law rather than reworded from the English pages — common-law entry and search under CJ(S)A 2016 s.46/47, sheriff officers and diligence rather than bailiffs, and after arrest, the 1 April 2025 repeal of Police Act 1997 Part 5 for Scotland (replaced by the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020) and the fact Scotland has no "caution" in the England & Wales sense.

• 2026-08-31

  Two Scotland claims corrected after judge review.

  The Scotland stop-and-search page understated the bladed-article search power as one condition rather than the two the statute actually requires, and a fiscal-fine recall claim on the warnings-and-fines page dropped the condition that makes a recall request valid. Both traced to an under-quoted source rather than a wrong reading of it. Full detail in /corrections.

• 2026-08-31

  Automated tests, linting, and honest reporting of unused authorities.

  24 new tests on the decision-tool graphs (no dangling edges, no unreachable outcomes, every outcome either cited or carrying an explicit unsourced caveat) — which caught a real bug: the printable rights card sent Northern Ireland readers the England & Wales card, asserting PACE 1984 duties under a statute that does not extend there. Fixed to an exhaustive jurisdiction switch with an honest blank card for Northern Ireland. Also added ESLint, and started marking authorities that are fetched and verified but not currently cited by any claim, so /sources can report them honestly instead of implying every entry is in active use.

• 2026-09-02

  Five new pages closing the highest-harm coverage gaps, plus analytics and a privacy page.

  Being arrested (the s.24 necessity test), detained under s.136 of the Mental Health Act, strip and intimate searches, conditions imposed on protests, and the Public Order Act 2023 offences — taking the site to 46 pages, 231 duty items and 275 authorities. Consent-gated GA4 analytics (Consent Mode v2, denied by default) and a privacy page were added at the same time, since publishing UK law without a consent mechanism for any future analytics would itself be a PECR problem.

• 2026-09-05

  Soft-delete for retired authorities, and a monthly check for stale stop-and-search figures.

  Authorities can now be retired without losing their verification history, closing the one stale entry that had no content left citing it. Added a monthly check comparing the committed England & Wales and Scotland stop-and-search figures against the upstream publications, so a new quarter of data is flagged rather than discovered by chance.

• 2026-09-05

  Refreshed stop-and-search figures: England & Wales to 2026-07, Scotland to Apr-Jun 2026.

  data.police.uk now publishes July 2026 (34,867 searches across 29 forces); Police Scotland’s newest quarterly release covers April to June 2026 (9,913 searches). Also fixed a format change in the Scotland source data (result codes changed from "Positive"/"Negative" to "POS"/"NEG" without a header change) that had been silently read as zero positive and zero negative results for every row in the new quarter.