How this site is sourced — and where AI is used
A reference site earns trust by being checkable. This page sets out the rules the rest of the site follows: what counts as a source, how figures are dated, how devolution is handled, and the specific, visible way AI-assisted reasoning is separated from cited fact.
BritIndex publishes 40 long-form pages and 16 short-answer pages about living in the United Kingdom. Every one of them carries a source list, a verification date, and a provenance note. Nothing on the site asks to be taken on faith.
The source hierarchy
A claim is sourced as high up this list as it can be. Where a lower tier is the only available source, the page says so.
- 1
Official
The UK government department, devolved administration, agency or statutory body that administers the thing being described — HMRC for tax, DWP for benefits, DVLA for driving, the NHS for health, the relevant council for local matters.
- 2
Legislation
The Act, regulation or statutory instrument itself, where the precise wording matters — the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Housing Act 1988, the Employment Rights Act 1996, or a Scottish or Northern Ireland equivalent.
- 3
Regulator
Ombudsmen, regulators and tribunals that decide disputes and publish how they decide them — the Financial Ombudsman Service, Ofgem, Ofcom, Acas, the ICO, employment tribunals.
- 4
Statistics
The Office for National Statistics, the Bank of England, NHS Digital, the devolved statistical services and other official data producers, used for anything numeric about the country.
- 5
Research / news
Universities, peer-reviewed work, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and established newsrooms — used for context and for dating events, never as the sole authority for a rule, rate or entitlement.
AI-assisted analysis is labelled twice
Once where it appears in the text, and again in the source list. It is never allowed to sit in a paragraph looking like a sourced fact.
AI is used on this site the way a research assistant is used: to read the source material, structure it, draft prose, and cross-check claims against each other. That work is invisible and unremarkable — the same as any editorial tooling.
What is not invisible is the second kind of AI output: a conclusion that no cited document actually contains. “Dial 159 before you report to Action Fraud.” “Escalate to the ombudsman rather than to court.” “This is the step most people get wrong.” Those are judgements. No department published them. They are reasoning over the sources, and they are marked as such:
Every page containing such a passage also carries a matching entry in its source list, in a separate block headed “Not a source — AI-assisted analysis on this page”, with no link, because there is nothing to link to. Machine-readable copies of the site (llms.txt and llms-full.txt) carry the same distinction, so a model quoting this site can carry it through rather than flattening our reasoning into an official-sounding fact.
Four nations, not one
Getting this wrong is the single most common failure in British how-to content.
Health, education, housing, planning, local government, transport, the environment and — in Scotland and Northern Ireland — most of the justice system are devolved. Scotland sets its own income tax rates on earned income. Social security is increasingly devolved in Scotland. Northern Ireland has a separate legal system and different rules on many everyday matters.
Tax administration, National Insurance, immigration, defence, foreign affairs, most consumer law and employment law remain reserved to the UK Parliament.
Where an answer differs by nation, the page says which nation each answer applies to. A page that only describes England will say so.
Everything is dated
Because in Britain a great deal of it changes in April.
Each page shows the date its facts were last checked against the sources. That date — not the build date — drives the lastmod in the sitemap and the dateModified in the structured data. A deploy that changes no content changes no date. The site-wide review date is currently 2026-07-30.
Income tax thresholds, National Insurance rates, the National Living Wage, benefit rates and the state pension all change at the start of a tax year in April. The energy price cap changes quarterly. Treat any figure from a previous tax year as indicative and confirm it with the responsible body.
What this site is not
- Not legal, medical, immigration, tax or financial advice. It is general information about publicly documented processes.
- Not a government service. We cannot look up your record, chase your claim, or act on your behalf.
- Not a substitute for the department. Where this site and an official source disagree, the official source wins — and we want to know so we can fix it.
- Not comprehensive on anything discretionary. Immigration decisions, tribunal outcomes and hardship arrangements turn on individual facts we cannot see.
Questions about how we work
Is BritIndex an official government website?
No. It is an independent reference site with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or funding by the UK Government, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Northern Ireland Executive or any public body. Where a page describes a government process, it links to the official page that governs it so you can verify the description at the source.
How do you decide what counts as a source?
In tiers. The administering department comes first, then the legislation itself, then the regulator or ombudsman that decides disputes, then official statistics, and only then research and news. A rule, rate or entitlement is never sourced to a news article alone.
Where exactly is AI used on this site?
AI is used to draft, structure and cross-check the writing, and to reason over the cited sources. Any conclusion that no cited document actually states — a comparison, a judgement about which option suits whom, an ordering of steps — appears in a dashed, labelled AI-assisted analysis callout and is repeated as an explicit AI-analysis entry in the page's source list.
Does that mean the facts are AI-generated?
No. Facts are taken from the sources listed on each page and are checked against them. The AI labelling exists precisely so that the two things stay visibly separate: what an authority says, and what we concluded from it.
How do you handle differences between the four nations?
Explicitly. Health, housing, education, most of justice in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and increasingly social security in Scotland are devolved. Where an answer differs, the page says which nation each answer applies to rather than describing England and hoping. Where a page can only responsibly cover some nations, it says which and why.
How current are the figures?
Every page carries the date its facts were last verified, and that same date drives the sitemap and the structured data. UK thresholds commonly change at the start of the tax year in April, the energy price cap changes quarterly, and benefit rates uprate annually — so a figure more than a year old should be confirmed with the responsible body.