Methodology
CivicSignals is a live index of primary records produced by the British state. This page covers what gets indexed, the standards each record is held to, the corrections process, and how the project is funded.
What gets indexed
Primary sources only — what the state writes, says, tables and publishes about itself. No news articles, no commentary, no leaked material.
CivicSignals currently tracks Written Parliamentary Questions, ministerial answers and Early Day Motions. New sources are added as the pipeline can sustain them.
How we work
Every record in the corpus is held to the same standards.
Verbatim quotes. Extracts are character-for-character what the source document says. No paraphrase, no condensation, no “cleaning up.” If a passage is too long to quote in full, the load-bearing sentence is extracted and the full text is one click away.
Full provenance. Every record includes the source URL, the date, the speaker or author, and a stable identifier. Any claim can be checked against the source in seconds.
Records preserved. Records are retained even if the original is later moved or removed by its publisher. Preservation is the baseline; search and analysis sit on top of it.
Restraint by design. Topic selection carries editorial judgement, but record pages remain restrained: the quote, the source, the date, the speaker and the provenance. Interpretation is kept separate from evidence.
Corrections
If CivicSignals misstates a source, the correction is made publicly.
A correction is anything where the corpus misrepresents a source document — a quote that isn’t verbatim, a wrong date, a misattributed speaker, or a link to the wrong document. Disagreement with what a minister said is not a correction.
Email corrections@civicsignals.uk . Response within seven days. If the correction stands, the record is republished with a visible link to the correction; the original is retained, so the public record is annotated, not erased.
Funding
CivicSignals is self-funded by the creator. No advertising, no commercial sponsor, no party donation, no foundation grant.
Citation
Cite CivicSignals pages by URL and date of access.
Source documents indexed by the corpus remain under their original publishers’ licences, including the Open Parliament Licence and Open Government Licence where applicable, and are surfaced with their original attribution.