About and how we work
Civic Scrutiny reports on local government in England from the documents councils are already required to publish, and from what freedom of information requests disclose.
What this site does
Councils publish a great deal by law: statements of accounts, committee agendas and minutes, registers of interests, contract awards, and spending over 500 pounds. Almost none of it is read. This site reads it and reports what is in it.
The full method statement is set out in what this site is and how it works. If you want to check our reporting rather than take it on trust, start with how to read this site.
The rules every piece has to clear
- Claims cite documents, not coverage of documents. Every factual claim carries a reference to the account, minute, register entry or FOI response it came from, so you can open the same page we did.
- Criticism goes to its subject first. Anything critical of a named body or decision-maker is put to that body for response before publication, and the piece records what came back, including silence.
- Fact and comment stay visibly separate. What a document says is reported as fact with the document attached. What we make of it is written so you can tell it is a judgement.
- Officers below decision-making level get a role, not a name. Decisions are made by named people acting in public roles, and those we do name.
- Corrections are public and permanent. Substantive errors are fixed in place, with a note saying what changed, and recorded in the corrections log.
The first and third of those are enforced mechanically. An evaluative claim about a public body with no citation in the same sentence stops the article from building at all. The gate exists to protect the reader from us.
How this site is funded
This site carries advertising. Advertising is sold and placed independently of the newsroom: an advertiser has no sight of a piece before publication, no say in what is covered, and no ability to have anything changed or removed. Nothing here is sponsored content.
What has not changed is the part that matters for scrutiny: this site takes no money from any council, and no money from any body it reports on. If that ever ceases to be true it will be stated at the top of the piece concerned.
Independence and technology
Editorial pages carry no analytics package and no tracking beyond what advertising requires; what advertising does require is set out on the cookies page. Charts are drawn inline rather than fetched from a chart service. Outbound links to source documents are ordinary hyperlinks, and following one takes you to somebody else's site under their terms.
Who publishes it
Civic Scrutiny is written and published by Kevin Yeandel. Correspondence, corrections and responses go through the contact page. This site publishes no email address and receives no email; the reason is set out there.