How this site is written
Source-first, never cite-after
Every page here is written in one direction: fetch the provision from its primary source — legislation.gov.uk for most of them, or gov.uk, mygov.scot, the National Archives’ caselaw site, COPFS or a named NGO where the provision or guidance is not hosted on legislation.gov.uk — read it, then write the claim constrained to what it actually says. The opposite order — write the claim, then hunt for a citation to hang on it — produces decorative references that look authoritative and support nothing. It is the most common failure mode in AI-written legal content, and the reason so much of it is confidently wrong.
Quotes are machine-checked
A script re-fetches all 279 sources — most from legislation.gov.uk, the rest from the other primary sources above — and confirms the quoted words are still present. It catches two different problems: a quote we transcribed wrongly, and a provision amended since we read it. A point-in-time source can change while its URL keeps returning a perfectly healthy 200 — silent drift, not an error.
The build fails if any tactical claim lacks a quote, or if any page does not say which jurisdiction it applies to. Currently 231 claims across 46 pages, all attributed. You can read every source.
What this site does not claim
- It is not legal advice. It is legal information. Your situation has facts we do not know, and those facts usually decide the answer.
- No solicitor has reviewed it. There is no “expert reviewed” badge anywhere on this site, because that would not be true. If that changes, it will say so with a name and a date.
- A verified quote is not a verified argument. Our checks prove the quoted words exist at the source. They do not prove the quote supports the point we are making with it. That judgement is human, and humans get it wrong.
- We never tell you to commit an offence. Where refusing is unlawful — Schedule 7 questioning, naming the driver, giving your details for anti-social behaviour — the page says so plainly rather than encouraging you into a prosecution.
Jurisdiction
England and Wales, and Scotland. The two are genuinely different — Scotland has no adverse-inference rule for silence, and its custody limits differ — so Scottish pages are written from Scottish law rather than reworded from the English ones. Northern Ireland’s own police powers are not covered. The exceptions are two powers that genuinely are UK-wide — Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, and the separate power to require a device password — which say so plainly on their own pages, rather than being silently left off a site that otherwise does not cover Northern Ireland.
Tell us when we are wrong
Corrections go to [email protected], and every correction we act on is published at /corrections with what was wrong and what it now says.